Vanilla
by Aria Marier
Summary: FINISHED. Who says vanilla has to be boring? Is it real, is it a dream? JouxSeto. In a place where the rules change, anything can happen.
1. Trial Size

Aria: Sparked by my sudden craving for vanilla ice cream earlier today. Disclaimer: If I owned Yu-Gi-Oh, do you think the shounen-ai would only be hinted at? Nor do I own Good Omens, or Neverwhere. Well, except for a few (very) dog-eared copies. But I don't own the rights or the authors, as much as I wish I had Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman around. But if anyone knows how to put me in contact with them.*wink*  
  
Oh yes. And this was really supposed to be a one-shot, but I'm up to 18 pages and I'm nowhere near done. So, you get parts. Besides, anticipation is good for you. Enjoy.  
  
VANILLA  
  
It started with Joey being hungry. It turned into a coincidence, and then the coincidence became something of a game, and then the game became a habit, until, finally, it turned into something new and strange and completely indefinable.  
  
But it started with Joey being hungry.  
  
And this is how it happened.  
  
* * * *  
  
Joey ran a hand through his hair, the other twiddling a pencil impatiently back and forth. He sat with one long leg swung over the arm of the bench, with one foot resting loosely on the ground and a book sitting between his pinky and thumb, leaning up against his thigh.  
  
He was hungry.  
  
Yugi had promised him that going outside would keep his distractions to a minimum, being away from TV's and video games and cards.although he'd brought his deck with him. It wasn't as if he'd be parted from his Red- Eyes ever again.  
  
And to give Yugi some credit, it was a spectacular day, and he was glad to be outside instead of wasting his time inside frying his brains trying to get a new high score on one of his video games. The sun felt really good on his neck and shoulders, and the park was kind of a nice place to be, even though people did keep walking by and staring at him. He wondered, idly, if it was really that odd for someone to be relaxing, reading a book in the park these days.  
  
Watching the people rush by, he guessed it was.  
  
And the day was nice, the book was pretty good.something about an angel and a demon and the antichrist.he hit a particularly amusing part and chuckled to himself.  
  
But he was getting kind of bored.  
  
And he was hungry.  
  
Closing the book around his index finger, he looked around. Except for a few dog-walkers and some people valiantly trying to relax under nearby trees, the place was fairly empty, but he thought he'd noticed a small refreshment stand around. Ah. There it was.  
  
Shutting his book, he stood up and stretched, feeling sun-warmed t- shirt stretch across his back and shoulders in a lazy, content kind of way, and reflected that late spring really was one of the nicer times of the year. Walking over, he felt the cool grass spring under his sneakers, and that was good, but then---  
  
"What?" He stared disbelievingly at the bored girl behind the makeshift counter. She shrugged, and kept chewing her gum.  
  
"Sorry," she said, without a trace of believability. "We're all out of everything. Just vanilla left."  
  
Joey sighed. "Alright, fine," he said, and handed over a handful of crumpled dollar bill and clattering change that he'd dug from out of his pocket. The girl looked at the sad pile of money, and swept it into her hand before digging out a large cone of vanilla ice cream.  
  
Turning away, Joey licked warily at the ice cream, annoyed. Vanilla. Figured. The most boring flavor ever. Although---he sucked a wayward drip off his lip and felt it melt against his tongue---he hadn't had it in so long that he'd forgotten that it was actually pretty good. Simple. Sweet. He shrugged, and walked along, concentrating on keeping the ice cream from melting all over his hand, until he saw a familiar pool of blue coat spread over the grass under a tree nearby. Curious, he walked over, and saw the ever-present laptop open and whirring lazily in the warm spring air, the usual silver briefcase glinting in a patch of dappled sunlight. The tapping of keys floated up, dull and monotonous, and he grinned.  
  
"Long time no see, Kaiba."  
  
Pale fingers paused, blue eyes flicked in his direction, and then the typing continued. "You know you're not allowed out without your license, Wheeler. Aren't you afraid you'll be sent to the pound?"  
  
Joey grinned easily before licking a small rivulet of vanilla off the cone. "Gee, it's nice to see you, too, Kaiba. Hard at work, I see."  
  
Blue eyes rolled. "Just because it has no meaning to you doesn't mean others are so fortunate," Kaiba replied, his eyes darting back and forth over the perfect rows of programming.  
  
"So this is why we haven't seen you around for the last three weeks?"  
  
The fingers hesitated, and Kaiba looked up, annoyed.  
  
"Listen, Wheeler," he began, but then a drip of melted vanilla that had been flowing unnoticed over Joey's fingers fell onto his exposed wrist, and he looked at it, surprised.  
  
"Oh," Joey said, looking down. "Um, sorry."  
  
Quirking an eyebrow, Kaiba lifted his wrist and licked the drip off quickly, tasting warm vanilla and wishing, abruptly, that he could close up his laptop and lay back in the warm, sweet-smelling grass. He stared at the suddenly meaningless rows of characters on his buzzing screen wordlessly for a moment, until he looked up and realized that Wheeler was still looking down at him.  
  
"What?" he asked, annoyed.  
  
"Nuthin'," Joey replied defensively. "It.um.it was nice seein' you, Kaiba." He waved long fingers---clutching a book, Kaiba noted with slight amusement---and walked off to a patch of sunlight some fifty yards away where he flopped into the grass and opened the dog-eared book, licking at the melting surface of his ice cream.  
  
Kaiba looked after him, and tasted vanilla.  
  
* * * *  
  
Summer heat found Joey in the park once again, this time sweating in the shade of one of the larger trees, fanning himself with his math homework while highlighting historical hotspots in brilliant yellow. Putting down the marker as he finished the chapter, he stretched up against the tree and tossed the book off his lap, rummaging in his pocket for the dollar he thought was in there. Pulling out a handful of loose change, he counted through it carefully; tossing away the bits of paper and lint that came with them.  
  
He'd been coming to the park almost every nice day, surprised and pleased to find that, after all, Yugi had been right and he'd been able to work much better here, outside in the sun and the soft grass. Not to mention the little reward he gave himself when he finished his work. He seemed to have developed something of a passion for vanilla ice cream, and he got a cone whenever he'd finished with his work, or gotten a particularly good grade, or when he had the money. The bored girl behind the makeshift counter at first seemed mildly surprised at his obstinately ordering the most unpopular of flavors, but she'd gotten used to it after a while, much as he'd gotten used to seeing Kaiba's long legs stretched out behind some shady tree, the sound of typing fluttering through warm late spring air, carried on the scent of grass and vanilla. The first few times they'd met here, he'd been surprised, but reflecting on it later he decided that if the park did wonders for his work ethic then it must surely have a magnetic appeal for the young CEO. They hadn't talked much after that first encounter---it wasn't like they'd been the best of friends, he thought as he paid for his cone and licked off a dangerously loose lump at the side---but they never seemed to sit that far from each other, and, though he didn't like to admit it, even to himself, Joey found that the now- familiar tapping of keys seemed to help his concentration.  
  
Sitting back down against the tree, he listened for it, but it seemed Kaiba had packed up for the day and gone home, so he opened up his---now very---dog-eared book and turned to the place he'd last left, chuckling softly at the ridiculous wordplay and enjoying a blustering, shy character as he attempted to fall in love and save the world. Dappled in the shade of the tree, he didn't notice as another shadow fell over him, or as Kaiba smiled slightly  
  
"More ice cream, mutt? Is that really that healthy?"  
He looked up, squinting a little, and grinned. "C'mon, Kaiba, look at me," he said, spreading his arms. "I'm skin and bone. I think a little ice cream now and then won't hurt."  
  
"Well, it's either that or this is your only meal of the day," was the dry response. He just shrugged, and grinned around a mouthful of melting vanilla that was cool against his tongue.  
  
"Done with work?" he asked after he'd swallowed, nodding toward the silver briefcase that Kaiba held loosely in one pale hand.  
  
"For now," the other answered, a little surprised at the friendliness of the question. True, they hadn't been exactly enemies of late, but it wasn't as if they routinely talked to each other or discussed anything in depth other than Joey's innate worthlessness and the fact that Kaiba was a bastard.  
  
Although they hadn't really been having many of those conversations lately, either.  
  
He felt a little awkward, but attributed it to the heat of the day and the weight of his customary trench coat. Looking at Joey, cool in shirtsleeves and worn jeans, he wished he'd reconsidered his usual wardrobe. "I see you've been busy," he said, gesturing towards the pile of papers and the history book that lay on the grass beside the other boy.  
  
"Yeah," Joey said, glancing in the same direction. "Homework, you know. Be glad next week when school gets out, and I'm free of the stuff for the whole summer. Won't you?"  
  
"Oh, yes," Kaiba said drily. "I can't wait to be stuck at the office every day from 9 to 5 without having school to break up the monotony."  
  
Joey just looked at him, a little taken aback by Kaiba's apparent readiness to be friendly, as opposed to the cold-hearted bastard he'd thought he'd known. "Well," he said after a short silence, "that would be kind of a drag, I guess. Still," he said, brightening, "at least you run the company. You could probably get some time off if you really wanted."  
  
"How astute of you," Kaiba said, amused. He watched Joey lick a trickle of ice cream from between his thumb and index finger. The scent of vanilla rose in the warm air.  
  
"Is it any good?" He asked, curious, remembering the small taste he'd had a few weeks ago. Joey shrugged.  
  
"I like it," he said, and then offered the cone up. "Want a taste?"  
  
Kaiba hesitated, surprised by the artless familiarity of the action, but the scent of vanilla was rising sweetly through the air, so taking the cone, he licked off a small mouthful of cold, sweet, slightly melted ice cream and handed it back to Joey.  
  
"Thanks," he said, and licked a trace of vanilla off his lips. Joey shrugged.  
  
"No problem," he said, and wavered only briefly before continuing. "Sit down," he invited, indicating a spot of dappled grass nearby. "Take a load off."  
  
Kaiba blinked. "I can't," he said, and didn't bother to hide the slight hint of regret that had crept into his voice. After all, it was a beautiful day, and it wasn't as if he was looking forward to getting back to his office and dealing with the reality of running an empire. He wished fleetingly that he could sit and talk with Joey, just relax in the warm sweet grass. But he couldn't.  
  
And why would he want to spend time with the mutt anyway?  
  
Joey shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said. "See you around, I guess."  
  
Kaiba nodded, and strode off, one hand in his pocket, the other sweating against the slim silver handle of his briefcase, the scent of vanilla swirling in his wake.  
  
* * * *  
  
June saw Joey stretched out in the sun-warmed grass, chewing on a green stem and slowly flipping the pages of a brand-new paperback book, the unbroken spine gleaming in the golden afternoon sunlight. Since school ended, he'd been spending most of his afternoons in the park, and after finishing his book; he'd gone out and bought two more, one by each of the authors. The one he was reading now was much darker than the other, and he frowned a little, his eyes darting back and forth over the small print.  
  
Reaching the end of a chapter, he closed the book and flipped onto his back, letting his arms sink into the warm, gleaming green grass, squinting as he looked up into cloudless blue sky, warm and clear, arcing thousands of miles up and around him. Closing his eyes against the bright sun, he dug fingers into the grass and pretended to feel the swing of the Earth as it flung itself headlong through its orbit.  
  
A coolness fell over him, and he squinted one eye slightly open, looking up into amused blue the same depth and color as the sky behind him. "Hey," he said indignantly. "You're blockin' my light, Kaiba."  
  
"You know, mutt, there are other things to do with your time than lying in the sun all day doing nothing," Kaiba said, looking down at long limbs loose in the dappled grass.  
  
"Yeah, well," Joey muttered, closing his eyes again, "I'm not doing nothing. I have a book."  
  
"So I see." A long-fingered hand came down and plucked his book from where it had lain in the thick grass, and Kaiba flipped it over, looking at the short summary on the back before he tossed it back onto the ground. "Which you find enthralling, I'm sure."  
  
Joey quirked a slim golden brown brow but said nothing, feeling like nothing more than a puddle of contented warmth and melted heaviness, although when the coolness moved away, he felt a slight disappointment that Kaiba hadn't stuck around, and he was lazily debating the pros and cons of getting up and getting the other boy to come back when he heard the snap of a briefcase opening and a small pause before the air was filled with the soft tap-tap-tap of fingers flying over a keyboard.  
  
Rolling his head to the side, he opened his eyes and saw Kaiba seated a yard or so away, back against the rough wood of the tree whose shade he was currently enjoying.  
  
He grinned to himself, and, grabbing the book from where Kaiba had dropped it, held it up against the blue sky and kept reading.  
  
He suddenly wanted ice cream.  
  
It was surprising, Kaiba thought to himself as he typed in rows of code and programming, checking every now and again some of the other running programs on the laptop, how easily they sat together now. Silence, it seemed, was very conducive to their particular brand of wary friendship.  
  
Was it even friendship? He didn't really know, not having too much experience to base such a decision on, but it was true that he no longer despised the mutt's company, and it was true that it was sort of nice to have a relaxed body so close to his own, and, looking at the mutt, he decided that the small frown of concentration that appeared between his brows while reading the small print must mean that he had some intelligence. Enough to appreciate a good book, anyway.  
  
Joey glanced over. "What?" he asked, bringing his book down and laying it against his chest.  
  
"Just wondering what you thought of that book," Kaiba said, a little abruptly, glancing back at his laptop. The typing sped up.  
  
Joey looked at the book he held, considering. "It's pretty good," he said. "Not as funny as the other one I read, but I guess this guy's pretty good on his own, too." He paused, watching a lock of silky brown hair fall across Kaiba's forehead and over one blue eye. "Did you---"  
  
The other boy looked up, expressionless, and Joey felt himself flushing under that cool blue gaze. "I mean, have you read it before?" The brown head nodded, and Kaiba turned back to his computer, but Joey, confidence bolstered by this unexpected peaceable response, continued. "It's a lot darker," he said, tossing his head slightly as he turned back to the book so that a few unruly strands of golden-brown hair fell back out of his eyes, "but really interesting. He likes that kind of awkward, trying-hard-but-not-really-getting-it character a lot, doesn't he?" The typing paused, and he glanced over. "What did you think?"  
  
"It's an interesting concept," Kaiba answered slowly, staring at the screen in front of him and trying to ignore the sudden slight climb of his pulse. He shifted a little, uneasy in this sudden lack of tension, and didn't look over. "But it's been a while since I've read it."  
  
"Oh." Joey watched him for a moment, and then turned back, flipping to the next page, and wondering briefly at the bizarre factors that had lead them to this; sitting in the warm late afternoon sun, only a few feet apart and not wanting to kill each other.  
  
And then he shrugged it off and became immersed in the book, sparing only a few extra seconds to register a craving for vanilla ice cream.  
  
* * * *  
  
Aria: Thus endeth part 1 of, I believe, 3. Hope you enjoyed. Leave some love. 


	2. Two Scoops

Aria: Hey, I got responses! People like me?  
  
Anyway, to my reviewers:  
  
Animom: You just don't miss anything, do you? And knowing you better now, I weigh your good reviews more than I did before---and seeing as I usually weighed them fairly heavily, that's saying a lot. I'm glad you liked my beginning.I hope I can keep it interesting and fresh for readers like you! Not to mention, of course, keeping it interesting for me. Every time I think I'll stop writing JouKai, and I go to write a different story, one just pops out of nowhere, so I guess I'll just go with it.  
  
Sarasusamiga: Your review made my day. No, really. It's not every day I get a well-planned, well phrased, thoughtful review such as yours. However, to keep from slowing down my notes too much, I'll post my reply to your thoughts at the end of this chapter as opposed to the beginning.  
  
Kuroi Karasu: Of course anticipation is good! Good like vanilla ice cream. And leave the poor old man alone.  
  
Yami hoshiko: You've read two other of my stories and you STILL like me? Wow.don't worry, here's the second part up and ready to be enjoyed! It may take me longer to finish the last section, but I'll do my best.  
  
Callisto Firestarter: I'm glad I've caught your interest. And don't think I haven't been thinking of fun ways to involve vanilla ice cream.  
  
Vappa: Yay! Love! Yeah, it's really just kind of a feel-good fic without any of the angst and personality clashes that I usually use. My last fic was so emotionally draining to write that I really needed something just fun and non-antagonistic.  
  
Fire Dragon of Darkness: I am always in search of new and interesting plot lines. I know what you mean---a lot of Seto/Jou plots get used over and over and over.this one may be simple, but it's different. Thanks for picking up on that.  
  
Angel of darkness: *ducks* who would have thought that candy hearts would bruise? Thanks for the love! As per your request, here's the second part of "Vanilla". And of course, you've uncovered my master plan.to force world peace by making everyone who would be fighting go off to find and eat vanilla ice cream! Bwahahaha!  
  
Okay! If you'd like to look over my specific comments to thoughts brought up by Sarasusamiga, they're at the end of this chapter. Thanks to my Beta, Dil, for suggestions and tweakings.  
  
VANILLA  
  
He'd tried to stay awake, he really had.but the powerful effects of flooding sunlight and the green rising smell of warm grass and growing things and a night spent in tossing, restless dreams that left his sheets soaked with sweat, and him awake with a dry throat overcame his feeble defenses, and the book had dropped unnoticed into the soft grass as his fingers relaxed and his eyes had closed into dark warm sleep.  
  
And that was how Kaiba found him, walking along a path in the park for his now customary afternoon working there. Sometimes he sat near Joey, sometimes Joey sat near him, and at others they ignored each other completely, but he always came, now, on the nice days---and it seemed like they were all nice days, recently---to sit and pull out his laptop and work there in the dappled shade, more often than not with a warm, lazy body a few feet or yards away, flipping slowly through---now slightly battered--- pages.  
  
And the warm scent of vanilla rose through the air.  
  
Looking at Joey now, he considered the long loose limbs, flung casually into the deep grass, and the low, even breathing of sleep. Noticed that the fight went completely out of his face and that the worry lines that he hadn't even known were there had softened, and that late afternoon light had a particular slanting effect that was spectacular in the bright hair.  
  
He settled down, his back against a nearby tree, and pulled out his laptop, clicking it on and waiting as it warmed to the task, humming gently against his thighs. Tapping quietly against the keys, he considered the past few weeks. These afternoons in the park seemed to be having a good effect on him---he was sleeping more deeply, refreshed after an afternoon in the sun and shade and brilliantly clear outside air, and he thought it was fair to say that his concentration---always quick and steady---had reached an unprecedented clarity unusual for summer. Usually he spent half his time wishing subconsciously that he could be outside in the beautiful weather, and now that he'd gone along with this wish, he worked better than ever.  
  
Which was why he kept coming back to the park. He didn't mind Joey's company every now and again, and sometimes it was even pleasant, but it certainly wasn't the reason he kept coming back. Although, he had to admit, reluctantly, to his most honest self that the lazy, sprawled body near him seemed to add another aspect of relaxed warmth to the times he spent here, and that it wasn't always as pleasant to work there when Joey wasn't around.  
  
Not to mention the strange craving he'd developed for vanilla ice cream.  
  
Minutes ticked by, sixty and more of them flowing over the sound of soft typing and softer breathing, and Kaiba looked up from his work only when Joey murmured something unintelligible and turned over in his sleep, while the sun shunted slowly to the west in a glowing circle of white-gold light and shadows lengthened, purple in the green grass.  
  
Almost two hours had gone by when Joey woke up. He stretched against the grass and looked over at Kaiba, wondering if maybe he weren't still in his dream.  
  
Kaiba looked up at the movement, amusement touching the corners of his mouth. "Nice nap, pup?" he asked, glancing back down to his screen.  
  
Joey rolled against the grass, stretching out and arching his back against the ground, feeling his back pop into place and lay back with his arms behind his head, closing his eyes again and enjoying the cool grass against the sliver of skin his shirt had risen over and left bare. "Yeah," he said. "What time is it?"  
  
"Almost five," Kaiba said, his fingers skimming quickly over the keyboard and not looking at the mutt. He was almost done.  
  
"Really?" Joey sat up and brushed himself off. "I should probably get going soon, I guess." But to Kaiba's amusement, he did nothing more than to pick up his book and thumb through the pages to where he'd left off.  
  
Silence settled softly between them, and for a while Kaiba worked quickly while Joey read, companionable and only a little awkward in this strangely intimate moment, but for some reason today Kaiba was slightly unnerved by the silence, broken only by his typing or the soft flip of a page being turned.  
  
"No ice cream today?" he asked, keeping his eyes on the screen in front of him.  
  
"No money," Joey replied, his eyes moving back and forth over the tiny print, pausing as he flipped the page. Kaiba remained silent, unsure as to how to proceed, and electing silence as the best way until Joey, still looking at his book, spoke again. Maybe he was feeling the effects of the silence as well, or maybe he genuinely wanted to talk---Kaiba didn't know, and he realized with a sudden sense of liberation that he didn't really care. He could type and talk with Joey at the same time, especially since one or the other of them would, every now and again, fall silent as he tackled a particularly complicated line of programming or an especially complex idea in a paragraph.  
  
Until Kaiba finished his work for the day and shut his laptop with a triumphant snap, packing it away in his briefcase with a cool sense of accomplishment and only a slight regret at having to leave the park, they remained quiet, and now, to his surprise, the mutt stood too, closing his book and stretching slightly. He stretched more than anyone Kaiba had ever known before, but, watching Joey draw himself out to his full height and then a little further, he thought it was fairly typical, considering Joey's inherent tactile nature. He was always touching something---running his hand through his hair, shoving a hand in his pocket, rubbing his face, rubbing his eyes, biting his nails, tracing light patterns on his stomach as he lay in the sun reading.  
  
"Are you going someplace, mutt?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow.  
  
Joey shrugged. "I told you, I should head out. Get back home and all. Like you said," he winked, "there are other things to do with my time than lie here all day, right."  
  
Kaiba said nothing, only packed up the rest of his things and then stood, feeling a little foolish standing in the shade for no reason, especially when he'd just decided to leave.  
  
He turned to go.  
  
"Hey, Kaiba."  
  
He looked back, into Joey's crooked smile.  
  
"How 'bout an ice cream before you go? Eat and walk. I mean," he quirked an ironic eyebrow and grinned, "you can do that, right? Like, Tristan, he tries, and ends up walking into a wall. Every. Time."  
  
"I thought you said you had no money."  
  
"I don't." Joey shrugged. "But I'm pretty sure you have some."  
  
Kaiba almost laughed at this complete lack of logic, surprised, and thought that he should leave, should get home to eat dinner with Mokuba and maybe watch a movie or read a book, since he'd finally finished his day's work, and that before he went, he should leave the pup with a passing cut, some remark to keep him from such ridiculous assertions.  
  
He nodded. "Fine."  
  
The girl in the snack shack gave them an odd look as she handed over two large vanilla cones, but she didn't say anything and they didn't mention it. Instead, they walked along in silence, eating their ice cream and thinking. Or, at least, Kaiba was thinking, so he didn't respond right away when Joey asked him something.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I said, where's the trademark trench? Trip over the hem one too many times?"  
  
Kaiba looked down at himself, remembering that he'd forgone his usual heavy coat today in favor of a light suit, but even that had gotten warm in the late afternoon sun, so he'd taken off the blue jacket, loosened the tie and rolled up the sleeves so that his pale arms could feel the warm sun and cool breeze. He held the jacket now against the silver handle of his briefcase, freeing up his other hand to hold the ice cream cone, enjoying the breeze against the light material of his shirt. He didn't realize that the loose shirt blew against his lean frame, softening it in a way that his trenchcoat usually hid, or that the collar, unbuttoned at the top and only slackly held by the loose tie, fluttered against his pale throat in the breeze, or that he looked casual and slim and undeniably attractive with his dark hair falling over his pale face and blue eyes bright in the slanting light.  
  
So he didn't think much of Joey's comment other than to be vaguely annoyed by it. "I just didn't want to wear it today," he said, swallowing a mouthful of cool vanilla. Joey nodded.  
  
"Fair enough, I guess."  
  
They walked on in much the same quality of silence that Kaiba had worked in earlier that day.warm, slightly awkward, and over all companionable, and it only changed when Kaiba's ice cream started melting.  
  
Joey had eaten his cone fairly quickly, but Kaiba's was only about halfway gone when they got caught up in an only slightly silted conversation on the book Joey still clutched in one tanned hand, so it started melting and dripping in the hot sun, causing Kaiba to stop in mid- sentence when a particularly large glob landed on the hand that held the cone. He looked at it, wondering briefly how to get it off without putting down his jacket and briefcase or getting ice cream all over his face when Joey said, "I'll get that for you," and swiped at it quickly with one long finger and then sucked it off, a sudden strange expression in his warm brown eyes.  
  
Kaiba just looked at him. He grinned, a little sheepishly, and they continued on, both pretending to ignore the spark that had flashed between his finger and Kaiba's white hand. A little further on, Joey excused himself and set off for his house at a saunter that turned into a jog when he turned the corner and then finally a full-out sprint, breath coming ragged in his throat while the taste of vanilla filled his mouth.  
  
For his part, Kaiba watched him go, and then walked purposefully home, finishing his ice cream slowly. Once inside, he placed his briefcase and jacket on his desk and sat in the chair, staring out the window at the beginnings of a glorious sunset, his fingers laced together.  
  
An hour later found him typing quickly, eyes darting over rows of glowing characters until his window was dark and he collapsed into sleep, dark and dreamless, exhausted by work while Joey struggled with dreams and woke with a blazing heat in the middle of the dark morning hours.  
  
* * * * *  
  
They didn't meet in the park for the next few days, which were cool and rainy, although at one point on the afternoon on the third day Joey put on a light coat and went out in the rain, returning forty minutes later with soaking wet hair and a vague sense of disappointment mingling with the fading taste of vanilla in his mouth, and Kaiba made a point of driving by the park on his way back from work, glancing over at the rain-sodden trees and paths and pretending he wasn't looking for Joey. He spent his mornings and afternoons working, had dinner with Mokuba, and then worked again in the evenings, even though he usually deleted whatever he'd done the next morning, typing late into the night and falling into bed and thick sleep, but Joey paced his living room and tried to read up on his bed, but couldn't get comfortable and woke up in the middle of the night from restless, vivid dreams that tossed him from sleep with a speeding pulse and wide eyes.  
  
It was brilliantly clear and warm outside the morning that he woke up with the taste of vanilla in his mouth and a stickiness on his sheets and stomach, and he took a long hot shower before going to the park.  
  
It was already late morning, almost noon, by the time he got there, but he didn't expect to see Kaiba for another hour or more. Not that that was why he had come. He read better in the park. He'd been cooped up inside for days, and it was a beautiful day, and he wanted to be outside, and he went about proving it with an almost violent determination; walking the many different paths, tossing a few crumbs of his lunchtime sandwich to brightly colored ducks on a small pond near the center of the park.but he didn't get ice cream.  
  
Finally, his feet a little sore from all the wandering, he collapsed in a fairly secluded spot, flopping back into sun-dappled grass and closing his eyes, and not wishing for Kaiba to appear out of thin air.  
  
So he didn't really understand the vague frustration he felt when he opened his eyes and Kaiba was not there, not looking down at him through cool blue eyes, not mocking him for bringing a book that he clearly wasn't reading. A little unsettled, he rolled to his stomach and flipped his book open to where he'd left off.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, he rolled to his back and tried to concentrate on the print.  
  
Ten minutes later he moved to a slightly sunnier spot, propping himself up on one elbow with the book in the grass.  
  
Eight minutes after that he gave up completely and flopped to his back, a tanned forearm thrown theatrically across his eyes.  
  
It was no use. He couldn't concentrate without the damned moneybags around, and he couldn't rip his thoughts away from blue eyes or a figure sitting quietly typing.  
  
"Dammit," he swore softly. He half expected a cynically amused reply, but none came, and when he moved his arm, Kaiba---seemingly in a fit of obstinacy---still wasn't there.  
  
Joey sighed and picked up his book again.  
  
Twenty minutes after he'd turned the page out of sheer stubbornness, not having actually absorbed any of the words that were even now dancing in the early afternoon sunlight, he gritted his teeth and prepared to re-read the second paragraph once again. He didn't want to know what time this made it, he just wanted to read the damn book and he would read it if it was the last thing he did.  
  
"Do you know, I don't think you've read a word on that page, pup."  
  
It came from above him, and he blinked, wondering at the sudden vague nausea that threatened to start his stomach clenching. His heart thudded, hard, once into his throat, and then he turned half over, feeling cool grass brush against his stomach.  
  
"Aren't you supposed to be someplace?" he asked Kaiba's left eyebrow. "Like work?"  
  
He didn't glance down, didn't grin, didn't move. Suddenly he wished he hadn't come.  
  
"Lunch break," Kaiba said, shrugging off his blue jacket and draping it over his silvery briefcase before sitting down in a patch of nearby shade. Joey looked back down at his book, but if reading had been impossible before, it certainly wasn't going to happen now. Annoyed, he closed the book and tossed it onto the grass before burying his face in his arms.  
  
"I wasn't aware you took breaks," he muttered into the grass and his arms, smelling his own warm skin, the fresh green grass and, incongruously, vanilla.  
  
He knew he hadn't had ice cream.  
  
Kaiba leaned his head back against the tree and closed his eyes; letting his hands relax in the cool, dappled grass. "Sometimes." he said.  
  
Joey paused. Or, at least, he felt as though he paused. In reality, he hadn't moved at all, and couldn't pause, and yet he felt his breath hitch the smallest bit, felt a small suspension of movement in the air across his back, in the sunlight that slanted across the grass towards him.  
  
"Sometimes," Kaiba said again, without noticing the sudden tension in the lazy, lanky body stretched out before him. He felt cool breeze against his throat, and absent-mindedly loosened his tie.  
  
He liked how he could be absent-minded here.  
  
There was enough of a certain well-known dreaminess in his voice that Joey had to look up, and he saw Kaiba's white throat pale in the warm summer light, saw a loose light shirt and the way it creased against Kaiba's lean chest and stomach, how the delicate fingers threaded through silky green grass. He saw fine dark lashes flutter slightly against pale cheeks, and one thin brown eyebrow twitched in response to a sudden and temporary shift of light and shadow over Kaiba's face.  
  
He tasted vanilla; warm vanilla as it slipped down the cone to land on Kaiba's white hand, tasted it slowly as he looked at Kaiba.  
  
He stood up, and Kaiba, opening his eyes, caught one solid look into panic-stricken grey-brown eyes, and sat in silence as Joey turned and walked quickly away.  
  
He looked down, and picked up gently the book that Joey had left there in his haste to get away.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Trying to read the next few days was fruitless. Not only had he left his book in the park with Kaiba, but trying to start the other book he'd bought was just a complete mistake. He kept finding himself longing for the warmth of the park, the sweet green grass and a vanilla ice cream. "But I can't go," he reminded himself loudly, sitting in the dreary kitchenette and toying with the crusts of his sandwich. "Kaiba's there--- at least I think he's there---not like it matters, but---"  
  
The crust fell apart, and he swept the crumbs violently off the tabletop, sitting back in his chair and glaring at the innocent shelves opposite.  
  
"Dammit," he swore softly, and grabbed his keys and a handful of loose change. He was only going for ice cream. And to get his book back, if Kaiba was there.  
  
Not that he wanted Kaiba to be there. Truth, he was a little freaked out by his recent reactions to the other boy, more so because, though Kaiba had frequently been prevalent in his dreams, he had always played the role of aggressor, or tormentor. Those had been nightmares. He wasn't used to having Kaiba in any other kind of dream, and when he woke up---  
  
"Dammit," he said again, and pushed the door open.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He wandered the park, his hands pushed stubbornly into the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched, kicking stones and taking grim pleasure in their rattling as they skittered off the path. The sun was gorgeous, but he didn't look up it, and hardly noticed the play of light and shade against his slouched back, or the feel of root and soil under his sneakers. There were children laughing, playing hide-and-seek in the nearby edge of woods, hiding in latticed branches or behind wiry bushes, thick with leaves, but all the notice he took was to side-step slightly when a pair came rushing by, tripping only slightly over the roots in the path.  
  
He'd been wandering for some time, without any change in his mood or bearing, choosing instead, to glare uselessly at the path before him, hardly looking from one side to another. He was annoyed that he had come--- annoyed that he was wandering with no purpose---annoyed that he hadn't found Kaiba---annoyed, as soon as he realized, that he was even looking for Kaiba. Not that he was looking for Kaiba. But Kaiba had his book, and---  
  
"Dammit." It was becoming a mantra of sorts. His eyes narrowed, and then closed, and then he straightened with a sigh, looking up into gently rustling leaves, noticing the freshness of the breeze against his neck and feeling his back and shoulders crack back into place as he rolled his head loosely and shrugged a few times. He was most annoyed that he was deliberately avoiding the place he thought Kaiba most likely to be, just because he didn't want to see him. Or maybe he did---too much, and therefore had to stay away. He didn't want to understand what made him react so oddly to the other boy---certainly they had been friendly of late, but that was hardly cause for---and even if it was, then it was fairly certain that nothing could ever come of it. Joey sighed a little, and sat down against a nearby tree, resting his head back against the rough bark and closing his eyes.  
  
Okay, he told himself sternly. Time to be honest. It's a crush, right? You've had crushes before. You know the symptoms: speeding pulse. Staring. Plotting ways to meet "accidentally". Dreams.  
  
Especially dreams.  
  
"So I've got a crush," he muttered quietly to the tree. "So what?"  
  
Yeah. That's the question, isn't it? Because you've seen what happens when it's a one-sided thing, haven't you? You've been there yourself a few times. And you always get over it---people do---but it still stings, doesn't it? And this one has a real potential to sting you back. What if he doesn't like guys? What if he likes guys, but doesn't like you? After all, you used to hate each other.  
  
"Or something," Joey agreed.  
  
Or something, yeah. But now.  
  
"It's like vanilla," he said.  
  
Yeah. Like the vanilla. You didn't want it, but took it anyway, because you wanted ice cream. Like you didn't want to talk to Kaiba---  
  
"Seto," he insisted, quietly.  
  
Yeah. Seto. Like you didn't want to talk to him, but you did because he was the only one there and you wanted to talk.and then.it was like the vanilla. You ended up liking it.  
  
Liking him.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
And now you crave it. All those times, sitting talking with him, you wanted vanilla. And every time you had vanilla, you wanted to see him, too.  
  
I wonder if he knows?  
  
Joey thought back, over their meetings in the park, about the wary surprise in Kaiba's eyes, about the drip of vanilla that slid down his cone and landed on the pale hand, about meeting, without planning, and sitting together. About talking together. About the last few times he'd seen him.  
  
I bet he does, he thought. If I were in his place, I wouldn't know. Too oblivious. But he's used to seeing things no one else sees. Details. Little things.  
  
If anyone knows, he does.  
  
So, he thought, cracking his knuckles and looking around a little absently, what am I going to do about it?  
  
That was the real question, right there. No matter how sensible he decided to be, no matter how many times he'd thought things through, that one question still threw him for a complete loop. Because every one of the scenarios in his head could never be acted on, couldn't ever really be brought actively into play because, let's face it, Kaiba would freak out. Well, maybe not. He grinned a little at the idea of Kaiba freaking out, and decided that seeing the other red and angry and yelling at the top of his lungs would probably be more amusing than anything else.  
  
If it didn't work out, he supposed he could always have some fun with it.  
  
But that wasn't the real issue.the real issue was, of course, some way to get Kaiba into a suitably romantic situation where Kaiba---and here Joey was enjoying his idea of a Kaiba within Kaiba, one who mightn't be annoyed by the whole thing but instead would confess his undying devotion.or something---could remain calm and he, Joey, could have at least one back-up plan, if not four. Or five.  
  
Of course, he thought a little ruefully, any planning he did wouldn't have any impact on the situation whatever, since he knew without a hope of ambiguity that he would toss aside plans and strategies at the last second, and throw himself recklessly in. Which could work, conceivably, but which probably wouldn't.  
  
It almost never did.  
  
"Dammit," he repeated softly to himself, and closed his eyes.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Aria: As promised, here are some more in-depth notes, brought to my attention by Sarasusamiga. Thanks!  
  
--...Like Joey, I'm a bit taken aback by Kaiba's apparent willingness to be friendly. My sense of Seto is that he'd try to stomp out any internal tendrils of interest in non-Kaiba people--they'd seem too much like vulnerabilities to him.--  
  
It's true that in general, Seto wouldn't be quite so friendly as he is portrayed here. And I don't usually write him this way, either-it's very much a stylistic difference for me. The story was started just after I had finished another, fairly grueling one, which featured a much more IC Seto. My rationalization is that he's caught by surprise, not only by Joey's friendliness, but also by the fact that he has been caught relaxing in the park at all. Having Seto go to the park and having him become friendlier seemed to go hand in hand. His surprise led to a momentary glitch in the wall.  
  
--But, hey, I don't mind seeing him acting a little better adjusted for a change!--  
  
Me neither! ^_^  
  
--Query about this portion: '"It's an interesting concept," Kaiba answered slowly, staring at the screen in front of him and trying to ignore the sudden slight climb of his pulse. He shifted a little, uneasy in this sudden lack of tension [...]"--  
  
--Wouldn't a rising pulse cause Kaiba to feel *more* tense? Or is he uneasy about Joey's lack of hostility?--  
  
This part was a little unclear, and I apologize for that. I meant to be ironic in saying that, because there was a lack of tension between Joey and Seto, Seto's own personal tension rises on its own, and we can tell by his speeding pulse.  
  
--And is the parallel between the character Joey describes and Joey's own personality apparent to either Seto or Joey? (I don't know the stories you're referring to, though, so I'm not sure whether the character is actually more like Seto--who's awkward and not-quite-getting-it in a completely different way.)--  
  
The original book I refer to is called "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and the character I mentioned isn't really a main one, but rather a minor side character that nevertheless has the opportunity to save the world. I wasn't really thinking about how that applies to Joey, so I can't really tell you if it's apparent to either of them, since I seem to have missed it myself! But you're right. He does have aspects of both Seto and Joey, although he's more completely like Joey. The second book I refer to is called "Neverwhere", by Neil Gaiman, and has a similar character, who is actually more the way that I seem to be writing Seto.  
  
I'm not sure if any of that made sense, but thanks again for the questions, and be sure to let me know if any of you have any more! Making me think about my stories is good.  
  
Cheers!  
  
-- Aria 


	3. Thirds

Aria: Because I could, I edited chapter 3. There aren't a lot of changes, but there are some. Also, chapter 4 is up and running! Thanks to all my reviewers and my beta, Lola.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Five months ago snow had been settled shyly against the dull brown-gray trees, with patches of still velvety, tired-looking grass reaching to weak yellow sunlight. Five months ago there had been a day of deep blue sky and slanting slivery sunlight, and warm breezes that smelled like melting snow flowing over the still frozen ground.  
  
Five months ago, Seto Kaiba sat at his desk in school and worked, and then sat at his desk in his office and worked, and felt that he was dying by pieces. He remembered thinking that, that he was dying by pieces, and he remembered not caring, because most of what he'd cared about was gone already, so what difference did it make anyway? So he worked, and clipped himself slowly out of the world, and didn't care.  
  
Five months ago he'd swiveled to look out at the golden blue winter sky and longed for green grass and green leaves tossing shadows onto his face.  
  
He reached down and picked up the dog-eared novel he'd brought along with him, flipping it over and reading the back cover.  
  
Again.  
  
He was unspeakably bored.  
  
For five days he'd been coming to the park every afternoon with this book, for five days he had flipped open his computer and stared at the screen with his fingers listless on the keyboard while shadows lengthened around him, waiting, he thought ironically, like "Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief."  
  
Not that that particular situation had any bearing on his—Shakespeare wasn't omniscient, after all, and he wasn't waiting for anyone. Anything.  
  
He flipped the book back over and ruffled back and forth through its pages, just as he had done for five afternoons, and was likely to do for five afternoons more, unless something changed.  
  
And clearly something had to change. He couldn't afford, any longer, to come to the park everyday and sit in the shade and the sun---he had work, real work to do and these afternoons, pleasant as they undoubtedly were, had become a luxury he could no longer bask in. He needed to go back to his office, clip himself out of the openness of the park in summer and back into his strict, safe, margined world of glass and glowing lines of code, of testing and tweaking and details and power. There really wasn't time for him to be sitting in the grass, skimming the pages of a worn, dog-eared book.  
  
But it was so nice.  
  
He turned to the front pages, his computer sitting humming softly in the grass next to him, forgotten for the moment in favor of soft worn pages and names that he scanned carefully before licking a finger and turning the pages to the beginning.  
  
It was a nice day.  
  
And he didn't, particularly, want to leave. Not yet.  
  
After all, it wasn't his book.  
  
He closed the soft pages around his finger, and flipped it to look at the front cover, the back cover. Again. Just like yesterday---and the four days before that.  
  
He should really give the book back to Joey.  
  
But, he thought to himself, watching the particular way the dark cover soaked sunlight and warmed in his touch, if he never saw Joey---since he never saw Joey---how could he give the book back?  
  
That was clearly the question, and it was the one he put to himself to answer, sitting there feeling the bright warm sunlight glowing in his hair and on the back of his neck, choosing to ignore that rather more interesting question that it brought up of why Joey had left it there in the first place. There had been a muttered excuse, half-heard in the confusion of tennis shoes rustling grass and tripping over a root like an out-stretched hand, the thud of running steps and then he was gone.  
  
He thought, idly, weighing the book against his fingers, that perhaps Joey was under some kind of stress, and then almost laughed aloud, hearing himself think about someone else, and Wheeler, of all people! he smiled, and didn't think about why the mutt had suddenly become Joey to him.  
  
Not that he was really thinking about Joey, but, still, it was odd, the transformation the mutt seemed to be going through---when they'd first met in the park, it was Joey's easy-going attitude that had startled him into a reply---he entertained, for a moment, a memory of Joey sprawling lazily in the grass, one hand holding his book open while he chewed absent-mindedly on the nails of the other---and now it seemed like the pup always had something else on his mind.  
  
It was wrecking Kaiba's concentration.  
  
He looked at the book thoughtfully, remembering the panicked flash he'd caught of brown-gray eyes before Joey had turned and left, forgetting his book behind him. Clearly he'd been startled by something, or afraid of something, but what it was, Kaiba didn't know. He'd certainly never seen that particular expression aimed at him from Joey---all he'd seen, in the past, was the ridiculous bravado the mutt put on, the stubborn will that still, even now, never failed to surprise him when it blazed into life, and, more recently, the surprising friendliness that he'd never expected to find.  
  
He frowned a little. Puppy had been acting very odd lately. Not looking at him, finding excuses to leave early, and---what had surprised him most--- snapping out retorts. So maybe the word wasn't "odd", exactly---maybe Joey was finally back to acting normal.  
  
At least, normal for them.  
  
But that was almost certain to cause problems, because Seto, at least, knew that he was no longer acting within any semblance of normality, and he liked it this way. He liked being able to sit in the shade and put aside his work and his life and his responsibilities for just a little while, liked how he could lie, like Joey, back in the grass and close his eyes to the sun.  
  
But he didn't want to do it alone.  
  
"You miss the mutt," he said softly to himself, eyes closed and arms crossed behind his head.  
  
His eyes opened. The park suddenly seemed very lonely.  
  
* * * * *  
  
In all fairness, Joey hadn't really meant to find Kaiba. He'd gone to the park with the express purpose of finding Kaiba, yes, but that hadn't meant that he actually wanted to find him---and, to be perfectly fair, he hadn't thought past finding him at all, or if he had, he forgot it now, hitting the toe of his scuffed tennis shoe against the edge of a laptop that was hidden in the thick grass and seeing the familiar lanky figure just beyond, blue eyes open and filled with sunlight.  
  
It was enough to make him choke on his ice cream.  
  
Kaiba, typically, didn't turn, didn't even blink, but he did tense a little, and then, relaxing, told Joey calmly "please not to break my computer."  
  
"You shouldn't leave it lying in the grass then, moneybags," he retorted, stung into defensiveness, before pausing, thinking, and wanting to smack himself in the head.  
  
One silky brown eyebrow quirked up, but Kaiba didn't respond, looking up into the guileless blue sky while Joey stared at his feet and forgot about the ice cream melting in his hand.  
  
"You forgot your book."  
  
Joey jumped. "What? Oh," he looked down at the book Kaiba was holding up for his inspection. "Yeah. Thanks." He sat down and took the book, flipping it over and rifling through the pages absent-mindedly, until the trickle of cool vanilla that had been slipping down the side of his cone slid onto his hand, and he looked up to see Kaiba watching him, expressionless.  
  
He flushed, and licked at the melted vanilla, hiding behind his thick bangs and wondering what on earth he was going to do next. Having actually run into Kaiba, he didn't want to leave, but he knew without the hope of a doubt that he would do or say something stupid, or possibly let slip—  
  
He flushed harder and bent his head down further, staring at the book in his hand and trying to convince himself that he looked nonchalant.  
  
He was as good as done for.  
  
So he concentrated on his ice cream instead, concentrated on licking off the melting layers and biting away at the cold solid core, the book forgotten in his hand, his eyes still down, and vanilla in his mouth and on his fingers, smooth and sweet and much more comforting than staring back into Kaiba's hard blue eyes.  
  
"Scared of me, Joey?"  
  
He jerked up, thinking in a sudden panic that Seto must be able to actually read minds now.  
  
"What?"  
  
Blue eyes blinked at him in sudden surprise, and turned back up to stare into deeper blue sky. "Just wondering why you haven't been around lately. Not scared of me, Wheeler, are you?"  
  
"Me? Scared of you?" He laughed, awkward and forced. It was that mask he'd worn so long around Kaiba. It felt familiar, and comfortable, and stifling.  
  
He wanted it off.  
  
"I've been busy," he said more easily, biting into the cone of his ice cream and sucking away a way-ward drop of cool vanilla, before tossing his bangs out of his eyes and looking up at the other boy, an expression of cool interest studiously stretched over his face.  
  
"Busy?" was the only response he got. Kaiba didn't even move.  
  
"Yeah." He felt the full ridiculousness of the statement looking at Kaiba. Busy. Because sitting around at home flipping out over some crush is so much harder than running a company. The studied expression slipped away, and he flushed hard, his eyes glinting behind thick gold bangs.  
  
"I see."  
  
They stayed for a moment, in silence, Joey staring at the grass after he finished his ice cream.  
  
His hands smelled like vanilla.  
  
"Thanks for bringing me my book," he said, quietly, and, hesitating, looked up to see Kaiba's response, but the blue eyes were closed and the lean chest rose steadily and smoothly in even breaths.  
  
Joey just looked at him, studying the paleness of his skin, the smooth material of his shirt, the way brown silky hair weaved into soft green grass. Leaning forward, he traced a strand of brown, feeling the smoothness against his callused fingertips.  
  
His eyes closed against the bright sunlight, Kaiba smelled vanilla, and almost smiled. "You've been acting strangely lately," he offered, feeling his chest sink down, his back pressing into the warm grass. No wonder Joey was always sprawled out like this, he thought. It's perfect.  
  
There was a pause, and a rustle, and as Joey snapped back into himself, panicked, Seto cracked open one clear blue eye to see him place long fingers against his forehead, sinking them deep into thick autumn-gold hair. He couldn't see his eyes.  
  
"What?" he asked, a little annoyed.  
  
"I have a headache," Joey muttered, eyes downcast and staring at the grass between his tennis shoes. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his elbows on them, staring, wide-eyed, down, as he felt his heart careening into his ribcage.  
  
What if he'd been caught?  
  
Later, Seto couldn't have said what prompted him to do it, but he opened that one eye further, reached out and patted Joey's bright hair softly. "Puppy ate his ice cream too fast," he said as he pulled his hand back and rested his head back on it, closing his eyes again to the empty blue above him.  
  
Joey's hair was so soft.  
  
He didn't see the way Joey froze, the way he lifted his head slowly to look at him, didn't see the surprise and sudden hope that were in the brown eyes, didn't feel the way breath hitched in Joey's chest.  
  
He did feel the slight pressure against his leg as Joey leaned back against the tree, stretched out one long jean-clad leg until his toe nudged Seto's calf, and began to read.  
  
It made him smile.  
  
* * * * * 


	4. Adding Sprinkles

Aria: A few notes before I go on with the story:  
First, thank you to my beta, Mai. You did a wonderful job of reading this over, and brought to my attention the second point:  
If you have read my stories before, you are probably familiar with my writing style. It is somewhat stylistic and takes a great deal of liberty with grammar and sentence structure. That being said, if it makes the story hard to read, please, by all means, let me know, and I'll try to tone it down a bit. Also, I now have no idea as to how long this story will be, since I want this relationship to develop realistically. I can't imagine it would go on for too much longer...check my profile for updates. Now, as for the reviewers:  
  
Kagemihari: Thanks so much! I appreciate your comments.  
  
Yami Hoshiko: Case in point. Another stylistic choice...but I'm sorry it didn't work for you. Anyway, here's the fourth chapter!  
  
Misura: I'm glad you enjoyed! I'm an avid reader of your fics as well, so I'm quite pleased with your response.  
  
TeeDee: More fluff (sort of) in this one!  
  
Kuraiko: Thank you! Ah, to be a Joukai gateway drug...*grins* Glad you enjoyed.  
  
Hakuryu08: Thanks!  
  
Pleasance: I've tried to be more specific about their inner thoughts in this. Hope you enjoy.  
  
Fire Dragon of Darkness: True, I can't write too fluffy without wanting to hit myself. Glad you like.  
  
Callisto: This one's short too, but I edited the other so....you won't hurt me, right?  
  
Sarasusamiga: The summer will last about as long as they normally do...and if it takes me into the fall or winter to get them together, then I guess I'll have to go for it! Thanks again for the reminder and comments! ^_^  
  
Lethe Seraph: Hey! Save some ice cream for Seto and Jou, huh?  
  
Darkmus: *glows* Thanks! I really appreciate the comments and encouragement, and I'm so glad you enjoy my story.  
  
Nyako-chan: Oh, I agree. Seto sundae is definitely in the making. *sing- song* I can't wait till I can write them together...  
  
Hush Puppie: Hey, cool! Thanks! I always appreciate being on favorites lists. It makes me feel so special. ^_^  
  
Shousetsuka1: Hello again! And the comment that made me think about other people reading my writing...like I said, it's mostly intentional. There are places where, like everyone, I slip up and misspell or forget the grammar structure, but for the most part...yeah. Meant to be there. Thanks for the in-depth comment!  
  
Darkness Rising: And more you shall have!  
  
Icy Flame: *glows* You're so kind! I'm so glad you like my style and story. I write so much Joukai that it's important to me to make each story different.  
  
Katsuki: Thanks!  
  
Bh: I hope you remember, too.  
  
Nekocin: I'm sorry you didn't like "Rescue", but I'm glad you enjoy "Vanilla". They are very different stories, and I've enjoyed writing them both, so I appreciate your kind comments.  
  
Animebay-b: Thanks!  
  
Alright! On with the story.  
  
VANILLA Chapter 4  
  
* * * * *  
  
The next few weeks were quiet, and uneventful, and full of gorgeous summer weather. Joey read his book slowly, savoring, not the words, but the presence of his companion, always remembering the pressure of that pale hand on his head, and wondering if it meant anything. Kaiba, for his part, was grateful that his little refuge hadn't been destroyed after all, and so stopped questioning Joey's sometimes odd behavior, maintaining instead a sort of unspoken agreement that in the park, regardless of what happened outside it, things could always be quiet and sunny and filled with work, reading, talk, and the ever-present vanilla ice cream.  
  
But all of this didn't explain the way he sat and looked out his window when he went back to the office in the afternoon, or his sudden restlessness when he went home in the evening. He still typed late into the night and woke up heavy-lidded from deep warm sleep, thinking about the park.  
  
And it really didn't explain the growing fascination that dragged his eyes from his laptop's screen to the lines that appeared between Joey's eyebrows while he read, squinting against the light reflecting from the white pages, or to the shimmering sun that slid through shaggy dark blonde hair. Not to mention the way he started if Joey happened to look up and meet his eyes, with the stupid grin of his.  
  
He took to wearing sunglasses, since the bright light made it too hard to see his screen, watching the lines of text expand and fill pages with their staggered black outlines, lines upon lines of text, each following the other until his head spun and he wanted to lift his eyes back into the clean air, convinced by his smoky glasses that the world had shaded. Darker afternoons crept in, where there was no superfluous light to shine in Joey's slowly bleaching hair, lighter and—Seto grinned to himself—somehow even shaggier now. It desperately wanted cutting, but Joey just shook it out of his eyes a bit oftener than before and kept reading, oblivious to everything except sun and warm grass and shade on the pages of his book, and the coolness of oncoming evening that prompted him to stretch out in the last brassy slants of sunlight, basking in the lazy summer days. Every day was a little different, but always more similar to yesterday than it would be different from tomorrow, and Joey stopped worrying about his crush and just let his heart pound once, hard, into his chest when Seto arrived, let his eyes drift from the dancing red-black type laid in rows upon rows on the pages he was reading to the shade caught in the folds of Seto's shirt, to the contrast between his dark glasses and—still—fair skin. Somehow Seto still remained white and translucent, polished, while Joey looked at himself in the mirror at home before taking a shower and watched his arms and face grow darker every day as his hair grew lighter, his teeth flashing white against tanned skin. In the mornings he would go to the beach and lie in the rough sand or in the water, feeling silky waves wash under him, before going home and washing the sticky salt away with hot water, even as he'd let the sand and salt bleach his nightly dreams into immaterial craving for the park and sweet smooth ice cream.  
  
Things might have gone on in this way indefinitely, every day glowing to a new beginning and glowing to the same ending as the day before, distinguishable only by what page or chapter Joey was on or by what program Seto was trying to perfect, if only Joey hadn't been a little late one day, and been forced to buy the last cone from the cardboard box, handed to him by the same bored girl from the spring, except now she grinned and winked at him, bending to scoop the vanilla into the cone as soon as she saw him running her way, and as he collapsed, panting, against the worn counter, she handed it to him with a small apologetic smile. "I'm afraid this one's a little fragile," she told him, gingerly passing him the cone, "It's the last one from a big box. It might break up a little."  
  
He grinned hugely at her, shaking damp—streaked with light gold, she noticed, melting a little herself—hair out of his eyes and took it carefully. "Thanks," he said, and passed her a crumpled dollar bill and a few coins. She swept them off the counter and watched him walk off, before turning the radio back up and smiling to herself.  
  
Walking quickly over the now-familiar paths, he licked at the ice cream and grinned, stretching a little. He'd swum out into the waves until the breath ran ragged in his chest, tasting like salt and copper, trying to burn last night's restless tossing out of his tired muscles, and he felt pleasantly sore in the movements of his arms and twisting back muscles, and then he turned off the path and saw Seto looking out over bright green soft grass and bright blue warm sky loosely holding his briefcase, shining silver in the sun.  
  
Joey didn't pause, didn't start, didn't jump, just went and stood nearby, concentrating perhaps a little intensely on his ice cream but otherwise perfectly at ease. "Whatcha looking at?" he asked, vanilla slurring his words a little.  
  
Seto shifted a little so that he could see Joey out of the corner of one long eye. "Isn't it obvious?"  
  
Joey shrugged and looked out in the same general direction, eyes squinting slightly from sea-salt and the bright sun. He saw sheets of sunlight laid down on grass with huge sweeps of shadow melting under trees; saw the worn- down path, all its cracks filling with moss; saw tree roots rising into the open air and arcing down to twist again into the soil; saw people walking, laughing, talking, arguing.  
  
"I see a fat guy jogging," he said frankly, and licked at his ice cream. All that exercise earlier had left him craving sugar and he didn't really feel up to playing games, so he saw with annoyance that Seto was wearing that small smirk that Joey used to want to hit.  
  
Actually, he still sort of wanted to hit it.  
  
"Honestly, it's just the park," he went on, looking out across the grass, the trees, the clumps of people. "There's not really anything special about it."  
  
Seto might have said something, or he might not have. Joey would never know, because as he looked down, squinting away from a sudden slant of sunlight, his hand jerked, his ice cream unbalanced and—  
  
"Oh, fuck!"  
  
The frail cone broke into three neat pieces—Joey wondered as he tried to catch it if perhaps that girl behind the counter was more conniving than he gave her credit for—and vanilla fell slowly onto his hands, creamy against darkly tanned fingers, cold after scratching sand and sun, and "Oh, hell..." before Seto's reaction caught up and he turned to help, getting only a slap of vanilla across the back of his hand for his trouble. He snatched it back as if it had been burned.  
  
Joey stared at the ruined cone, at his handful of vanilla, and shook his head, walking to a bush and dumping the mess into thick green leaves. He shook his hands out, watching droplets of ice cream fly off his fingertips, and wanted to laugh, or yell, or maybe just sink into the warm black pavement and avoid ice cream, fragile cones, and Kaiba for the rest of known existence.  
  
So he almost missed seeing Seto look at the vanilla on his hand, and, had he missed it, he would have missed too the sudden wary pause in the blue eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses or washed with sun these days. He recognized it.  
  
Seto was thinking about something he didn't want to think about. Joey recognized those slightly drawn-in silky brown eyebrows, the flash of white teeth, the cautious blankness in slanted blue eyes. How could he not? He'd been watching that face for months.  
  
He decided.  
  
"Sorry about that," he said, wiping his own hands off on his already dirty jeans after licking them mostly clean.  
  
The smell of vanilla was everywhere.  
  
Kaiba shrugged and moved for a tissue, stopped, and just brought his hand to his mouth to lick the ice cream off, remembering suddenly the first time he'd seen Joey in the park. He'd had vanilla on his hand then, too.  
  
He remembered watching Joey walk away.  
  
"Whatever," he said brusquely, turning back, looking out and ignoring the taste.  
  
"Yeah, well..." Joey was floundering. Now that he'd made his decision, he didn't want to go through with it.  
  
But talking to Kaiba's back was always easier than trying to talk to those inscrutable blue eyes. He took a deep breath, trying to think of something to say, and...and...  
  
And he couldn't do it. He couldn't stand there and tell the guy he had a crush on him...life just didn't work that way, and even if it did, it still wouldn't help him out here. This was Kaiba he was thinking about, for chrissakes.  
  
Joey shook his head, thinking. There had to be some way to bring this up...but the problem was, he still wasn't sure how to talk to Kaiba without there being the clear end result of offending him...and this was about as far from that as it could be. So he tried to convince himself that what he was really doing was starting a fight, and that, instead of confessing to crushing on Kaiba, he was insulting him.  
  
It didn't really work.  
  
"I lied," he said. "It isn't just the park. I wait all day to come here, and then I wait for you to show up. I guess it's not the park so much as the fact that I just want to see you, Kaiba. I guess I like you."  
  
This is that moment, Joey thought. The one I knew was gonna happen. The one where I make a huge fool out of myself.  
  
And then he realized that the moment had already happened, and when Kaiba stiffened and turned around, his eyebrows knitted together and blue eyes totally unreadable, he already had the uncomfortable expression of someone who would clearly like nothing better than to pretend what he just said or did never happened, and was mentally yelling at himself, as if that would suddenly yield some answer to the situation. In fact, he could barely hear what Seto said over the tumult.  
  
"What?"  
  
Thin shoulders shrugged, thin lips tightened in annoyance. "I said, what do you mean?"  
  
Joey stared. "What do I mean?" he echoed in disbelief, suddenly feeling extremely annoyed. Dammit, he was going to get this through Kaiba's thick skull if it killed him. "What do you mean, what do I mean? What part of 'I like you' don't you get?" He stopped short, feeling slightly run-down, but the look on Kaiba's face set him off again.  
  
He was never going to forgive the bastard for this.  
  
"Do I gotta spell it out for you?" he asked, stepping forward. He hadn't felt so furious in—he had no idea, but he knew he had sometime. This wasn't how it was supposed to go—this wasn't any of the ways that it was supposed to go. The thought that perhaps Kaiba was toying with him sent a flush of blood to his face and he launched back into it. "Do people just never say that to you? What do I mean—what do you think I mean?" He started ticking points off on his fingers. "I mean I come here everyday so I can see you, even though you—regularly—piss me off. I didn't dare come get my book because I thought you knew about it...I've got a fucking crush on you, okay? And everything that comes with a crush, meaning there's nothing I'd rather do than stop trying to play all these fucking mind games that I'll never win at anyway and actually get you to like me too."  
  
He paused to gauge the reaction so far, but saw nothing—absolute nothing. The blankness in the blue eyes scared him, and he leaped back into the fray with sudden panic and a comfort in his own reckless noise.  
  
"You're egotistic, and a know-it-all, and a rich arrogant bastard and smart and actually nice when you want to be and so fucking beautiful that I can't take my eyes off you, as I'm sure you've noticed. And now I guess we're just going to go back to hating each other, since the other option clearly isn't going to happen, and I'm sure as hell not gonna stick around now that you know all this, you rich bastard. So stop toying with me."  
  
He took a breath, and steadied from the rush. He could feel his nails digging into his palms, his hands forced into fists, his whole body was trembling with anger and nerves and maybe just a little bit of anticipation.  
  
So he waited.  
  
And waited.  
  
And watched as Seto turned and walked off, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around the silver handle of his briefcase.  
  
The scent of vanilla swirled in his wake.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Aria: Next chapter: Seto's reaction, and what Joey did after he walked away. Till next time! 


	5. With a Cherry on Top

Aria: **pant pant **It's…done! I apologize for the VERY long delay…fact is, first I had written about half of this, before deciding I hated it and deleting the whole thing, and then we started packing up our house to move…anyway, it's done now! Huzzah! Now, before I get carried away, must thank the wonderful, amazing reviewers! You've all kept me going. Thanks are in order:

Callisto: Oh, yes I can And yes, he did. Cute, huh?

Lostlover1: Thanks for the, um…enthusiasm? laughs and holds up cliffie award Arigatou!

Darkmus: Glad you liked it! Thanks for the notice.

Kagemihari: I feel you…the uber-fluff can be way scary.

Animom: Here it is! Hope you enjoy.

Yami Hoshiko: Sorry for the delay! Here's the ending!

Macduff's Mistress: Your wish is my command.

Sakata Ri Houjun: That's exactly what I'm going for. Hope this measures up.

Kuraiko: And I wish I knew your language so I could thank you properly in it for your wonderful reviews.

Lethe Seraph: Well, he IS Kaiba…

Ember: evil chuckle Sadly, that's the writer's prerogative.

Animebay-b: Glad you enjoyed.

Amarin Rose: If it makes you feel better, I had hoped for kissage too.

Chibi-Serenity: It's a little late, but here it is.

Kujiku Tamashii: **blush **Thanks!

Sarasusamiga: Scared is one word for it. "Severely repressed" is probably the one I'd use, though…

Fire Dragon: Yup, Jou- and Kaiba-angst is a wonderful thing…but then, so is Joukai.

Denisse: And you'll get one. That's my next project.

Bh: Hope you find it to read this!

Tuulikki: You got the tone exactly right. Thanks for the reviews.

Imigo: Thanks for the vote of confidence!

Nyako-chan: I'm certainly glad some people do!

Haruya: It was quite easy, actually

And here we go. There will shortly be an epilogue, but it isn't necessary and will probably increase the rating, so I'll wait a little while before putting it up

Enjoy!

**Vanilla**

* * *

Joey wandered in the cooling evening, enjoying the brush of late-sun-warmed air against his skin, still burned from sand and salt water and the heat of humiliation. He'd walked most of his embarrassment off, but even now his cheeks flared a little at the memory—

_Blue eyes were cold and unyielding. "What do you mean?"_

He grimaced, a flush slowly rising, hot, over his neck and cheeks, eyes shunting from side to side while he unrolled his fingers from their sudden fists slowly, feeling them creak with stress at the joints. Well, it wasn't like he hadn't known it was going to happen like that…but still…

The park was blue in the evening, pink and orange still barely glowing along the edge of wispy clouds and tree branches, warm and soft and fading inevitably into the shades of evening. People were still walking about, only now they all seemed to have paired off…young couples still in the heady first few weeks of physical attraction; older couples enjoying a moment of solitude, quietly carrying on conversations years in the making; couples making out on the park benches; couples arguing with the heat of new-found, or long-practiced, passion; couples walking, sitting, talking, laughing.

He hated them all.

Rolling his eyes, he sat down in the cool grass, watching the blue shadows stretching lazily, and sighed. At least now it was all settled. All out in the open. Out of the closet, so to speak.

He groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

He never wanted to taste vanilla again.

* * *

The weather for the next three days was sticky and hot, promising the thunderstorm that finally rolled in during the second day's still afternoon—purple dark cloud bellies marching inevitably between hazy sun and heat-baked earth and black streams of rain pummeling down—but the third day remained just as hot, just as humid, just as oppressive and the storm slunk defeated to the east, still rumbling impotently.

The third day was reaching ninety degrees and above, languid and still with heavy air and the remnants of electricity, thick swathes of blue-gray clouds blurring the brighter blue sky above thick leaves and trite birdsong.

The third day was when Seto found Joey lying back in the grass, sweating, with one slim brown arm thrown over his face to block the sun and the other resting by his side, near the ever-present paper-back which was closed, Seto noted, with an odd sense of finality. No stem of silky green grass poked out from between the pages; no emphatic dog-ear marked Joey's place.

He felt, suddenly and with great certainty, at a loss, so instead of speaking, he merely sat down against a nearby tree and pulled out his laptop, feeling it whir into life and oppressive warmth on his lap. There was something comforting in this sudden awkwardness—somewhere old barriers had been dredged up reluctantly from dusty hiding places and there they sat, glowering, between him and the prone figure on the grass not two feet away, part of the shimmering air and the heated purring of the machine on his thighs, reminding Seto of the careful oppression he'd used up until that surprising day a few months earlier, something mechanical, trustworthy, mindless.

Safe. Never mind sweetness. It never got you anywhere, and he couldn't allow any distractions anymore. Besides, sweetness is more trouble than it was worth, he mused, just look at Wheeler---loyal, trusting, likeable, loving. Sweet like the surprising, simple sweetness of vanilla, and it did nothing but get him in trouble.

Better to be bitter, and safe.

Joey shifted.

"I finished the book," he said, not opening his eyes, not moving his arm from his face, just having shifted his body slightly from the left to the right.

Seto was watching the grass springing slowly back up, glossy, from where it had been crushed down by the weight of Joey's body, and almost didn't hear what he said.

"Took you long enough," he commented, hearing his own voice harsh in the still air. It was too hot—he should have stayed inside. He could still taste the metallic conditioned air from his office.

Joey didn't reply.

"And how did you like it?" he continued, still looking at the grass. It was fascinating, watching the dull gray-green blades flex, glimmering green as the tips rose into the hazy sunlight.

Joey shrugged, shoulder blades digging into scratchy grass. "It was good. Really good."

Silence.

Seto stared at the code on his computer screen, and didn't want to change it, sweating lightly in the heat. Funny, he'd never thought about the heat of the park before, even in these months of sun and blue skies. It must be the haze, he thought, and wiped away a bead of sweat from his forehead. Looking over, he noted that Joey still hadn't opened his eyes, and frowned. It was unnerving, this lack of reaction. He found himself suddenly thinking back to their old arguments with something that felt annoyingly like misty-eyed appreciation, before wrenching himself back to the situation at hand.

"That's all you've got, mutt? It was good?"

A quiver of thin eyelids, and a crack of brown showed between thick dark lashes, leaving Seto unexpectedly relieved.

Not that he had been looking.

The brown disappeared, rolling back up into darkness. "I liked that it turned out so no one knew anything that was going on, except for the one kid, and I liked the kind of logic that he used, that no one really needs to go to all that trouble to build something up just to tear it down a few thousand years later—it just makes no sense. And, you know, really, who knows what the hell any one is thinking or planning anyway, so, yeah…" He paused, feeling horribly adrift, and groped vaguely for the idea he was searching for. "Right. Yeah. Ineffability. I liked that. Nothing absolute except the ineffable plan. That's the way it really is."

Seto snorted, keeping his eyes on his laptop screen, darting back and forth over rows of code. "I'm surprised you could even grasp the meaning of ineffability, Wheeler," he said.

That did it.

Joey rolled to his side and levered himself up onto his elbow. His eyes were wide open and cold, surprising in his tan, friendly, familiar face, but there was nothing familiar about the expression in the deep brown eyes—they were icy, and angry, and dark. Seto felt a sudden and surprising thrill shiver up his back, and felt confused. "It shouldn't be surprising at all, moneybags," Joey spat, narrowing his eyes, "it means everything's set by someone else, and I have no idea what's going on."

He stood up, hands clenched into fists at his sides. "I guess I'd know _exactly_ what that means."

And he walked off.

Seto looked after him, and decided against telling him that he'd left his book again.

This was going wrong—terribly, horribly wrong. The park was supposed to relax him—Joey was supposed to relax him, not exist in this ridiculous and stubbornly clinging cloud of friction. He would have sighed, if sighing was something that Seto Kaiba would or could do, but he leaned over and picked up the book instead, rifling through its pages with a sense of déjà vu. The paper was worn and soft against his fingers, the type flashing in and out of view as he flipped back and forth, until he began to notice a pattern in how they followed each other, certain pages flipping to open more easily than others, lying open for his inspection. He looked closer. No, not a pattern—the mutt was too chaotic for that kind of thing. He wouldn't have had the patience to mark themes or images down with any degree of consistency. Instead, here was a dog-ear at a paragraph Joey had found particularly amusing, here one with a scribbled note next to it, here a smudged thumbprint slightly blurring the words. Seto went through them all, flipping carefully from the beginning of the book to the end and back again, reading the most worn pages most carefully.

It was an hour later before he closed the book carefully and placed it next to him on the grass to wonder. He had never imagined that the mutt had the kind of concentration to read that carefully, but, really, he mused, it wasn't so different from the one-mindedness he showed in dueling and in his everyday life. Mutt sees something, mutt gets interested, mutt keeps at it until he wins—understands—gets what he wants.

Speaking of which.

Now he _did_ sigh, leaning his head back against the rough tree bark. Three days. It had been three days since Joey's little explosion, and he had managed not to think about it since then—but it seemed as though his fragile haven was in danger of being wrecked over it, and he couldn't allow that to happen, so perhaps now was the time to think it over, consider it in the light of everything else that had happened, but—

No. He might not want this little idyllic, even pastoral, hour in his busy day to be ruined, but even that seemed a more viable option than actually entertaining the mutt's outburst. He wouldn't think about it. If it meant the end of quiet afternoons in the park, the end of almost-friendly companionship and the end of summer as anything more than a slightly lighter business suit, then so be it.

Reopening his laptop, he made a mental note to give Joey his book back the next day.

Half an hour later, it started to rain.

And it rained.

And Seto suddenly realized that he didn't want to wait until tomorrow to see Joey, after all.

* * *

The evening was much cooler. It had only rained for an hour, maybe less, and already Joey could see the difference in the park—the grass looked clean and new, springing from the wet ground with fresh determination, the soil was wet and warm and soft, even the pavement had been washed clean of chalk drawings, scattered pieces of gum, and the occasional piece of paper. It glistened now in the slanting late evening sun, golden and slightly hazy from dandelion and milkweeds puffs raised by the rain.

He hadn't been far away when the rain began—in fact, he'd only gone over to the next walkway before plunking down against a different tree, swearing at the heat, the hard baked ground, and Seto's damned indifference. He could have taken rejection, mockery, anything but that damned impassiveness and the unreal déjà vu of Seto sitting there, calmly typing away, when just a few days before Jou had exploded like some kind of temperamental time bomb. Did _nothing_ faze the guy?

He groaned and leaned heavily against the rough tree bark, feeling wet seep into his hair. He banged his head lightly against the tree, trying to think of something good about the situation, and failing utterly.

Wait. Ah yes. There _was _one thing. "At least I have my health," he muttered, and thudded his head back against the tree.

Thud.

"At least I have my health."

Thud.

"At least I have my health."

Thud.

"Well, you won't for long, if you keep banging your head against the tree like that. I know you're thick-headed, but I doubt even your thick skull can take that for long, Wheeler."

Don't look up, Joey told himself firmly. He's not really there. He's not actually standing there _insulting_ you after everything that's happened.

"At least," he ground out, eyes screwed tightly shut "I have." Thud. "My." Thud. "Health."

He brought his head smartly back against the tree, and saw stars flash against the red-black of his eyelids—but he didn't hear anything. Or anyone. Feeling better, he opened his eyes, rubbing the back of his head ruefully. "There," he said cheerfully to the Seto that he knew wasn't there, really, at all, "I knew you weren't really—oh."

Blue eyes stared back at him, amused. "I'm not really what, Wheeler?"

"Never mind," Joey grunted, levering himself up off the sopping grass and wincing at the cold, rain soaked jeans clinging to his skin before fixing Seto with what he hoped was an icy glare. He was pretty sure he wasn't getting it right. "Did you want something?"

Expensive material dark with rain whispered against itself as Seto pushed the ragged paperback book into Joey's chest, and Joey grasped at it reflexively. "You forgot this again."

"Oh," Joey said, looking down at the book he was clenching to his chest. "Gee. Thanks. That was awfully thoughtful of you, moneybags, but if you'll excuse me—" He began to push past Kaiba. He didn't need to deal with this right now—he didn't _want_ to deal with this right now, and, fuck, he wasn't _going_ to deal with it, not now with his head hurting and his jeans wet and clinging and the memory of rejection still fresh and cheerfully bouncing around the back of his mind. He didn't ever want to deal with it, so when Seto moved to stop him instead of letting him past, he turned, already angry, already annoyed, already perfectly ready and willing to fight. He wanted to argue, to push Kaiba the way he was being pushed, and then push him some more. "What, moneybags?" he asked, letting the anger come up. Anger. Ice.

It felt good. He continued.

"You've got something else to say?"

Blue eyes narrowed. "Shut up, Wheeler."

Joey could have laughed. This was what he needed—anger, arguments, fights. He almost wished it would come to blows so he could burn that perfect icy face out of his mind, replace it with fury and resentment. Instead, he straightened, and the hand holding the book fell to his side. "Don't tell me to shut up, Kaiba—"

"I'll tell you to do what I want." His voice was quiet, cold, and Joey shivered in spite of himself.

Hurry up and fight me, Kaiba. I can't last long here.

If Seto noticed any weakness in Joey's stance, any bravado in his rebellious, resentful expression, he didn't react to it. Instead, he continued, his voice still measured. Controlled. "You're avoiding me. You've run from the park twice now. Is there," his voice dropped to an intimate, coldly sarcastic tone, "anything I should be knowing about, Wheeler?"

No expression crossed the set face, no warmth of curiosity lightened clear blue eyes, and Joey, crossing his arms defensively, felt oddly hunted, and hated it. "Is there anything you should be knowing about?" he repeated slowly, eyebrows rising. "Is there anything you should be _knowing_ about?"

Seto snorted. "I already asked the question, Wheeler, I don't need to hear it again from you. Or is that just a new trick you've learned? Very good, but sadly useless. That's a parrot trick, not a puppy one. I know it's easy to get the two confused, but really—"

He never got to finish the sentence, because Joey had closed the gap between them by the distance of one step. Then another. Warm breath ghosted across the suddenly sensitive skin of Seto's cheek, and he fought the impulse to step backwards. "I think," Joey told him quietly, "that you already know the important parts."

Seto stood his ground. You have to give him that much, Joey thought, admiring him in spite of himself. He stands his ground.

"And I'm supposed to do what, exactly, with that information?" He titled his head just slightly, narrow shoulders squared and pushed back, gaining an extra half inch with which to look down, and Joey flushed hard and dropped his eyes to the ground, burning with resentment and impotent fury. "Was the a particular reason why you felt the need to tell me in the first place?"

While Joey stood in awkward, stubborn silence, Seto pushed aside the questions crowding his mind. He couldn't really say why he was initiating this conversation, except that it had felt vaguely, uneasily _wrong_ without Joey around for the past few days. Not that he had been _looking_ for Joey—but it was easier to work in the park when there was someone else around. It could just as easily have been anyone, but the fact was that Joey was always there. He had gotten used to seeing the lazy body stretched out on soft green grass, had gotten used to the sudden interruptions and questions and asinine comments—had gotten used to, in the end, Joey's company and everything that went with it. And somehow, even when Joey was there now, it wasn't the same.

He wanted whatever had been broken back. And he wanted it now.

He didn't like it, but he was stuck with it now and so he had to find a way to make the whole thing work again—but it certainly wasn't because he was curious as to why Joey had exploded the way he had. He'd asked only for information, not for personal satisfaction. He didn't care. Not. At. All.

And he wasn't about to admit that it had anything to do with why he heard sudden, hard heartbeats thudding in his ears.

Joey finally shuffled uneasily. "I dunno," he admitted. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. And I thought you'd already known about it—it came as kinda a surprise to me, too, when it turned out you didn't."

Seto snorted. "Of course I didn't. The thought never even crossed my mind, Wheeler. Why would I possibly have known?"

Joey blinked quickly, and shifted his weight. "Well, I just thought—" He paused, and went absolutely still, his mind running over what Seto had just told him.

Somewhere in Seto's head, something screamed a brief, totally useless warning.

Brown eyes blinked, light gold hair took the dying sunlight and scattered it as Joey slowly looked up. "It never crossed your mind? What, _exactly_, never crossed your mind?"

Seto was aware of treading at the edge of some deep and unpleasant pit, but he straightened and ignored it as best he could. "Anything between us."

"Oh, _anything_ between us? You never thought about it? Never once?" The sun sparked off Joey's suddenly narrowed eyes, deep behind thick dark lashes, and that something in Seto's head screamed louder. The deep, unpleasant pit seemed closer than ever. "So all these times we've met up in the park, whenever you waited for me or I waited for you or we spent hours talking when you really _should _have been doing work, that's not actually _anything_, is it, clearly nothing like friendship even if it's nothing else, and I threw myself at you three days ago and you haven't even _considered _it?"

Something was going horribly, drastically wrong, and Seto took a step back. He'd goaded Joey plenty of times in the past, and he'd gotten him pretty mad, too, but this was something different—this was something beyond Joey getting mad at the usual jibes. Joey seemed personally insulted that Seto had never thought of him in that way. And hell, maybe even more than insulted, because Joey was stalking towards him now, and Seto kept taking steps back because, fuck, Joey was big now, bigger than Seto had thought. He accidentally stepped back into a root and slammed up against a tree and Joey was in his face. Seto stared at him and shook his head, his pretensions vanished in the face of Joey's sudden cold fury, and Joey stepped right up against him, pressing him into the tree with his whole body, glaring into his wide-open, surprised eyes. Warm breath puffed, strangely sweet, into his face as Joey leaned in closer still and Seto wondered wildly for a moment if Joey had gotten ice cream during the rain because he smelled inexplicably like vanilla.

And Joey leaned across Seto and whispered into his ear, soft and demanding and alarmingly hot, "Well then. Consider it."

He stepped back, and Seto retained just enough of his haughty dignity to stay standing, pushed up against the tree, rough bark rubbing uncomfortably into his shoulders while Joey walked away for the second time that day, carrying his book and whistling energetically and tunelessly into the gathering dusk.

He leaned back once Joey had turned a corner and he could no longer hear the tuneless whistle or smell sweet vanilla over warm grass and damp soil, listening to his heart pounding against his ribs. And he thought, Consider it? Right.

Like he'd be able to think about anything else now.

* * *

It took Joey almost until he reached his apartment complex to cool down, and even then he stormed around the kitchen ranting to himself for another half an hour before finally collapsing into a dilapidated couch, exhausted from working himself into full dramatics for such a long period of time.

And even then, he had enough steam left to snort derisively at the ceiling and mutter the occasional annoyed comment about Seto's total lack of sense, his apparent lack of eyesight, and his complete and utter lack of knowing when a good thing came his way. It was one thing, he thought bitterly, to know himself that Seto hadn't ever thought about him in "that way"—it was one thing to despair over his own knowledge that the whole business was doomed from the start.

It was quite another to have all of that confirmed by Seto.

The ceiling remained impassive, and Joey, after eyeing it for a moment, decided to call in the proper reinforcements.

"I mean, come on!" Joey ranted, waving his arms expansively. "Is he blind or something?"

Yugi, sitting cross-legged on his bed, furrowed his eyebrows. "Blind?"

"Well, yeah," Joey plopped down next to him, only to get back up and start pacing again a second later. "Or straight. But if he's not blind or straight, then don't you think he'd have considered me?"

Yugi looked quizzical. "Considered you?"

"I mean, I'm not exactly ugly, Yug. Like I'm a pretty good-looking guy, right?" Yugi nodded quickly, glad to finally have found the right answer. "But no! Not even considered! Didn't even cross his mind! Not once! I practically threw myself at him and _still_ no!"

He crumpled against the far wall, glaring at his socks, and Yugi cleared his throat. "Well, Joey, I have to say I find what you're telling me terribly, terribly funny. Awful," he corrected quickly as Joey looked up. "Really awful. But, honestly, Joey, I don't really see why you're getting so worked up about it. It's only Kaiba, and he topped your ten most hated people/things/ideas list from when you first met him up till a few months ago." He shrugged. "Maybe it's just not worth it."

Joey shrugged against the wall, feeling suddenly tired. "You think he's not worth it?"

Yugi thought for a moment, searching for the right way to say what he was thinking. "I don't know, Joey. You're getting all worked up about it, but really, it's just Kaiba. He hasn't changed much—he's still rich and smart and kind of a bastard, really, when you get right down to it, unless we're talking about Mokuba, but we're _not_ talking about Mokuba, so—"

Joey rolled his eyes and thudded his head back against the wall. "I _know_ all that," he said. "But it's like, okay, remember when we went into the game to help save him?"

Yugi nodded slowly, unwilling to give a solid opinion on a train of thought he wasn't sure he was fully following. "It's like," Joey continued, "that game, it was huge, right? And it was full of people and things and magic and legends, and really incredible places, right?"

"Yeah," Yugi said, wondering where this was all going.

"So," Joey seemed to be struggling slightly with his metaphor, "so, it's like that, right?" He looked pleadingly at Yugi, who remained politely blank, and sighed. "What I mean, is—you know, is that game—it was just a bunch of lines of code and numbers if you just looked at it, right? Just those weird pod things and lines and lines of code. That's what it was, really, but _within_ that, there was this incredible world. This incredible, beautiful place, and he thought that whole thing up. That's what I mean."

Yugi considered this. "So," he said carefully, "Kaiba's worth it because he could make up the game?"

"No!" Joey got up and started pacing. "No, that's not it at all. Well, I mean, that's _part_ of it, but it's not the whole thing—"

"Okay, Joey," Yugi said soothingly. "So what _is_ it like?"

"It's the difference between that weird code you can see but not understand and the incredible world you can experience," Joey said suddenly, and then looked rather shocked at his own success.

"Ah," Yugi said. "One of those."

"I don't think I'm getting the kind of sympathy I think I deserve," Joey growled, and flung himself on the bed next to Yugi, who grinned at him and hit him in the face with a pillow.

"That," he said, "is because you're making too big a deal out of it. You've already told him, right? Twice. It's his move now, especially since you made it pretty clear that he does, in fact, have to make a move of some kind. Even," he added thoughtfully, "if it's only to run away." He _oofed_ as Joey whapped him in the stomach with the pillow.

"Gee, thanks," Joey said sourly as Yugi laughed helplessly next to him. He pulled himself up onto an elbow and looked out the window. "I guess I do know that," he said, "about it not being my fault, or my move, or whatever. But, you know, I still wonder."

"Why he's never looked at you and said to himself, 'Damn, that Wheeler kid's turned out nice'?"

Joey pounded a fist into the pillow. "Yeah."

* * *

As a matter of fact, something not entirely unlike that was passing through Seto's mind at that moment, and if it wasn't in so many words, well, that wasn't the fault of the thought, was it? If, in fact, it was far more of a short burst of annoyance at Joey's tendency to mess everything up while being, and this was added as a reluctant qualification, fairly attention-grabbing, then that was probably a result of Seto's having sat in his office for the past three hours without getting a lick of work done. Ten minutes ago he'd looked at his computer screen and discovered that he'd typed the same line of text three times in a row without noticing.

Attention-grabbing, indeed. And then came the uncomfortable suspicion that Joey would not, in fact be able to mess everything up to the degree that Seto attributed to him were he not utterly capable of grabbing Seto's attention, and keeping it.

Seto leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together, his elbows resting on the arms of his comfortable wheeled desk chair as he swiveled to face the large windows of his office. Pale fingers wove together loosely and rested coolly against each other.

He'd been right—he clearly _hadn't _been able to think about anything else since Joey had left him stunned, pressed up against the rough damp bark of the tree in the park—and he resented it; resented that his perfect memory was now playing back perfect memories of Joey leaning up against him, of Joey sleeping in the dappled grass, of Joey licking slowly at his ice cream while brown eyes roved innocently up to his own; resented that his coolly calculating mind was now coolly calculating the odds of seeing Joey again tomorrow; resented, most especially, the sudden and entirely unwelcome knowledge that all his evenings and nights and mornings of hard, cyclical work only to delete it all the next day were simply yet one more defense he'd unconsciously built up against the influence of the park and Joey's damned ice cream.

Seto glared out at the bright evening that was building slowly over the city, cool and sparkling clear from the rain. In the park, light would be shunting down at an incredible slant through the transparent green leaves, and the sky, where it wasn't beginning to glow yellow and orange in the distant west would be the same bright, iridescent blue that arced over the Kaiba Corp building. All the colors in the park would take on a new richness and light from the slanting sun and shadows, brighter, more alive than they had been all through the day. A dog would trot by with nose low to the ground and short tail wagging jauntily, rich copper against thick green grass while green and yellow light sifted through lazy spinning particles and thin leaves, spilling slowly from the sparkling blue sky.

And still he thought about Joey, and the livening colors before they were bleached and chilled by incoming clouds or moonlight, and about the rich scent of vanilla he was sure he could smell somewhere.

He was curious now, that was certain. He hadn't lied when he'd told Joey that he'd never considered anything between the two of them, but, strictly speaking, he _had_, perhaps, been _bending_ the truth a little. Surely cutting any thoughts such as those out of existence the moment they sprang into it counted as not considering. Anyway, he decided, he was a busy man, and had no time for such things. In fact, it would be better if he stopped going to the park at all.

Seto nodded, pleased at the direction his train of thought was finally taking. Yes, that was what he would do—cut himself away, since his policy of not allowing interactions had failed.

But he still didn't turn from the window, and his computer still sat ignored, as the sun bled out into thin night.

Seto's new plan lasted almost exactly fourteen hours.

Ten and a half hours after making his resolve to avoid the park no matter what, he arrived at the Kaiba Corp building feeling fresh and decisive, and immediately ran a meeting during which he decided to spend ten per cent of Kaiba Corps profits every year on upkeep for the city's public spaces. His PR rep loved it—she'd been trying to get a friendlier, public oriented face on Kaiba Corp for years, and every year Seto had brushed her aside, but this year she seemed to have surprised him during a good mood, and she bustled off to make arrangements while Seto rode the smooth, silent elevator up to his office, now feeling vaguely put out.

And the vanilla-flavored coffee his secretary brought in for him didn't help matters.

An hour after that, he'd given his secretary a new schedule which did not include his customary trip to the park during the lunch hours and early afternoon, and she sighed inwardly, having already made an appointment to get her nails done. He felt slightly better, and got to work.

An hour and a half after that, he sat looking at the work he'd gotten done, checking it over again and again, looking for the minute detail that needed to be changed, the tiniest word that could be rephrased.

He found himself looking out the window, and brought his mind back to earth by calling in his PR rep and canceling the public spaces upkeep plan. The mournful click of her heels on the hard wood floors as she walked away to commiserate with his secretary allowed him to concentrate fully again.

Half an hour later he was hungry, and ate a sandwich his secretary brought in to him and hurriedly left on his desk, smiling grimly at an image of Joey sitting on one of the park benches, eating a lonely sandwich. Of course, Joey hated being alone—eventually he'd pick up and move to where there was someone he could annoy, like the girl at the snack shack.

Seto frowned slightly, and put his sandwich down. On second thought, he wasn't really hungry.

Fifteen minutes after that he caught himself staring out the window, brought back to the office only by the timid knocking of his secretary on his office door. He glared as she brought in papers and a cup of coffee, and glared as she picked up the finished papers, and glared as she went back out again. He picked up the cup of coffee and, for lack of anything else to do, glared into that as well, watching his reflection shiver and bend in the tiny ripples.

Clearly, this was not working as it was supposed to.

Twelve minutes later, he packed his laptop into his briefcase with a few papers, drank his coffee, and left the office, his chair still swiveling slightly behind him, his secretary watching him leave with open surprise. He stalked all the way to the park, fuming at the growing need for sitting in an open, green space with time on his hands and a friendly, lazy body nearby.

Seto had, after the first moments of surprise all those weeks ago, begun to find some small pleasure in Joey's society, and after weeks of finding that small pleasure, they had formed a habit of each other, as though they were insidious drugs. Like a deprived addict, Joey tossed and turned in restless sleep; like someone determined to beat an addiction by willpower alone Seto had worked himself to exhaustion every night, but in the end nothing seemed to work. Seto was a creature of habits—he knew this, and he fought against them when he felt they were unnecessary while keeping those habits he found soothing and harmless, if not actually beneficial. Summer days were monotonous enough that new habits were easily formed—having once fallen into a pattern it was simply easier to keep going rather than to stop. It had become habit for the two of them to quit the usual insults and keep instead a kind of awkward silence—it became habit for that silence to return to speech, where insults were exchanged for teasing grins and jibes—it became habit to meet here, in the heat of the afternoon, under falling dappled shade to talk and read and work companionably, although no appointment had ever been made and no hint of their meeting had ever been suggested.

He'd always been dependent on habit—it had become, early on, a habit for him to be the best at whatever he put himself to; either for his own reasons, or because others expected him to be. You couldn't run a company of the breadth and width of Kaiba Corp without becoming a slave to routine—times to go into work, times to go to meetings, time to get out of work; hours and minutes and timetables all working against him. He'd become dependent on habits almost out of self-defense.

Joey was something else, though, he thought. He had never thought of Joey's wild golden personality as being a knowing, willing slave to anything, let alone routine.

Perhaps they were more similar than he had previously imagined.

It was in the heat of the afternoon by the time he got to the park, and he was already sweating lightly, though the rain from the day before had cleared the air. Bright sunlight poured down on him, flashing between graceful tree branches that rustled calmly in a sudden playful breeze that whipped at the light material of Seto's shirt and slacks, his tie already loosened and his jacket relegated to the handle of his briefcase, and he smiled, a small and slightly rusty movement of the edge of his mouth, but he felt it was the proper thing to do on a day like this, in a place like this, when he felt like this. He smiled to feel the sun on his back, the breeze teasing his hair and collar; smiled at the green scent of warm grass; smiled at Joey sitting casually on a nearby bench eating a cone of vanilla ice cream, but let it slip from his face as Joey looked over towards him. Keeping his face straight, he stalked over, and sat down beside Joey, whose long arm was draped over the back of the bench, licking slowly at his ice cream, slumped lazily in the sun. Not looking at him, Seto opened his briefcase, pulled out his laptop, and began to type.

They sat that way for a long time, Joey sitting lazy in the sun with his heart pounding, deliberately licking away at his ice cream, Seto ticking away at the work that had eluded him in the office, vibrantly aware of the warm body next to him and of the way Joey ate his ice cream slowly, licking at the dripping sides and biting delicately into the smooth coolness. There was an odd, but familiar, tenseness in his chest, a similarly familiar heat building slowly up between his shoulders—familiar because these were what he recognized as being his recent reactions towards Joey, odd because this was the first time he'd simply…let them happen.

And then Joey missed a drop, momentarily distracted by a nearby dog catching a Frisbee, he looked up and the drop slid slowly towards his hand, melting quickly in the hot sun. He didn't see it.

Seto did.

He watched out of the corner of his eye while the drop slipped down the arc of the ice cream, watched it pool at the edge of the cone, swell, then slide slowly down waffle-marks in a tiny creamy white rivulet to land suddenly, a tiny pool of cool vanilla on the sensitive golden tan skin of Joey's hand and fingers.

It was the sudden shock of cold that made Joey turn back abruptly, surprised, and pass his cone to the other hand, lifting his hand to his mouth to lick the vanilla off. It would have been nice, he thought, if Seto had done something. He remembered swiping melted vanilla off of Seto's hand and putting it into his mouth to cool the heat of sudden, violent attraction. He remembered a drip of melting ice cream falling to land on Seto's hand, and the delicate way Seto had licked if off, looking suddenly not at ease.

Seto watched him, and knew that he was remembering the other, similar times when melting, sweet vanilla and sudden awareness struck at the same moment, forcing the habit to shift, forcing the routine to change, so he reached out none too gently and grabbed Joey's hand away, bringing it to his own mouth and, delicately, licked off the small pool of cool, sweet vanilla.

Joey watched him curiously, wondering if it were, perhaps, safe to begin breathing again and unsure as to how to react, but when Seto let go off his hand and turned back to his laptop, Joey shifted the cone back into the original hand, tingling from the touch of Seto's breath on his hand, warm breath against cool skin. Heated images spun through his head at this thought of warmth and cold, sweet vanilla and violent attraction. He shifted to glance at Seto.

"If you wanted some ice cream," he told him, "you could have just asked."

Blue eyes looked up from blue screen, and moved from the melting cone of vanilla to Joey's roguish grin, and he reached out to take the cone. The scent of vanilla rose steadily through the warm air as he licked at it and took a large bit, so that when Joey leaned over and kissed him, he tasted vanilla—cool vanilla melting slowly in his mouth and in Joey's, sitting together in the park with the afternoon cooling into blue-green night.


	6. Epilogue

Aria: Gomen! I know this is extremely late, but there's a good reason. I'm out of the country, and I only just got Internet, so I could only post this today. Also, I hope has fixed it's posting system!

Here it is, finally, the end of _Vanilla_, unless I ever decide to rewrite it, which is possible, but highly unlikely. I already feel as if I'm beating a dead horse by posting this epilogue, but I hope I will be forgiven by my few fans out there.

To my reviewers: you have been my light and inspiration through all of my writing, and I owe you more than you can know. I have many more projects in the works, to be posted in the coming months. Check my profile, or my author's livejournal, at livejournal dot com slash users slash ariamarier.

And yes, I realize I've rephrased a few of the flashbacks.

That said.

EPILOGUE

A month later, Seto had to work late. Afternoon had slid thoroughly into the cool of a late-summer evening that he walked rapidly through, appreciating the fresh cool air against his tired face, but by the time he walked through the entrance to the park, stars were already winking into the clear night sky. He walked a little faster, his footsteps sounding lonely in the empty park. Purple-dark shadows stretched their long fingers over the cooling blacktop, pooling into thick blacks and blues as the moon rose to the east and spilled a silvery half-light over the walk, so familiar in day, now strange and dangerous in the beginning night.

Fall was definitely creeping in now. Seto could feel the slight shill of it on the back of his neck, where air whispered between his skin and the collar of his shirt. The air was getting slightly cooler, slightly moister. Soon the trees in the park would start to change colors; already the leaves were losing their glass-like translucency. The shade was thicker, deeper in the afternoon sun than it had been; the evenings came a little bit earlier, the mornings a bit later.

But the park was the same. The ice cream was the same, it was the same girl serving it, and it still tasted delicious when he tasted it in Joey's mouth.

He halted under the cover of trees, standing at the edge of moon-induced shadow and a flood of slivery green grass, shaggy and glowing softly in the weak moonlight. Nearby a lamp splashed a pool of thick yellow light onto the grass, but only a few paces away night had settled deeply in.

White teeth glittered for a moment in the dark, and then Seto stepped over the edge and moved deeper into the shadows.

He heard Joey before he saw him; heard the rustling and easy breathing from a corner of the dark field, and narrowed towards it, letting the stress of the day run away from him like water. When he judged he'd gone far enough, he halted, closing his eyes, unwilling to allow his sight to adjust to the dark.

He liked the dark.

Especially when Joey was waiting for him in it.

A moment later, strong hands came out of nowhere and slid around him, flattening against his stomach as a warm solid figure pressed against his back. Seto smiled faintly and leaned back as the arms locked around his waist, feeling Joey's chest expand gently as he breathed, when a low chuckle brushed his ear and the arms disappeared into the cool darkness, along with the warm presence at his back. Seto listened, but couldn't hear past the warm land breezes sweeping through branches thickly filled with leaves. His eyebrow flicked, and the low chuckle sounded again, this time in front of him.

"No cheating. Keep those eyes closed."

He stood, concentrating on the feel of cool, moisture-rich night air against his skin, the dew forming on the grass, listening to the rushing of leaves in the wind and the occasional flutter of thin wings as a bat sped past him in pursuit of his supper.

Minutes passed, and he couldn't hear Joey. Another minute, and it seemed clear that he was alone.

One more minute.

He opened his eyes, blind in the dark, and never saw Joey as he came rushing out of nowhere, hitting just at Seto's waist and throwing long arms around him as they both thudded down onto the wet grass, and now Seto could feel Joey warm against him, his body shaking with helpless laughter as they fought on the ground, rolling over and over until they were both soaked and panting. Seto pushed Joey off him, and he rolled to a stop a foot away, giggling helplessly.

"That's right, mutt. You're a real riot." He moved over to where Joey was calming slowly down, giving the occasional hiccupping giggle as he lay back in the damp grass to look up at the night sky, hazy with moisture and late summer warmth, and looked up through his lashes so that the stars shone with dancing points. A darker shape loomed above him, and he tilted his head with a grin, allowing Seto to pin him down gently, long fingered pale hands on each of his wrists, pushing them back into the damp ground.

"Just thought you could use a little action after a long day at work." Joey jerked his head up as Seto settled himself over him, missing slightly and kissing his chin instead. "Why'd you want to meet so late today, anyway?"

Seto shrugged. "Something a little different, I guess. Besides, how was I to know you'd actually show up? It's not like I asked you to wait here for me."

That was true. Since the afternoon on the bench a month before, virtually nothing had changed. They still met in the park, still talked and read and did work together, still had their little habit, albeit the frequent breaks for ice cream often had different results than there had been a few weeks before.

And they still never hinted at the likelihood of their meeting tomorrow or the next day—they simply came to the park, day after day, when they could, and pretended not to wait for each other. It was never suggested that they meet at a certain time or place, only understood that they would.

It was also never suggested that there would be any difference in their association outside the park's limits. It was understood that there would not be.

Seto had not, in fact, asked Joey to meet him, at night, in the park. He had merely mentioned to Joey that he would be working late for a few days and that it wasn't likely he'd be able to leave the Kaiba Corp building until sunset or nightfall. In fact, he hadn't seen Joey for the past few days because he'd been working late.

But he had come to the park every night.

Just in case.

"Noooo, that's true," Joey conceded, wriggling beneath Seto's taller frame, "but you knew I'd be here anyway." It was the first time either of them had mentioned their unspoken agreement, and Joey winced slightly, wondering what would come of it. He was getting tired of meeting Seto in the park, tired of not being sure if Seto would be there, or even if he, Joey, wanted to continue with the whole game. The park was like a dream, but now he wanted something real. Something with substance, something to hold on to when he had himself convinced, before he went to sleep at night, that none of it had ever happened.

Although, to be sure, he would have been highly surprised, and probably fairly amused, that something similar was running through Seto's mind during the long hours he spent at work, or typing with his eyes glued to his screen until the small hours of the morning.

Because nothing, really, had changed.

Abruptly, he rolled away from Joey and stood up, feeling his shoulders crack. Beneath him, Joey scrambled to his feet, running long fingers through his hair and wondering if this was where the trail ended.

"What's the matter?"

Seto picked his briefcase up from where it had fallen in the thick grass, and brushed it off. "Too chilly to be outside."

Gripping the handle of the briefcase, he strode off in the direction he had come with Joey staring after him in confusion.

Three.

Two.

One.

"Seto—"

"Well, are you coming, or not?"

Blinking, Joey paused while the insinuation filtered through. Seto was leaving. Seto was inviting him to come with him—to his house. Out of the park.

Out of the park.

Joey jogged to catch up with Seto's swift stride. "I guess so, if you're gonna be that way about it. Didn't wait around here all night for nothing, you know."

Seto snorted, keeping his eyes on the path. "All night? It's only a few minutes past nightfall, Wheeler."

Shoving his hands deep into his pockets to get away from the chilly evening air, Joey only shrugged. It wasn't really worth rising to the occasion, Seto was clearly only speaking the lines, not really playing the part. But he _did_ have to reply. "Don't get on your high horse, moneybags, or maybe I won't come after all."

In the dark, a slim brown eyebrow arched, and a thin smile gleamed momentarily. "Maybe you shouldn't, then."

Joey snorted. "Oh, please. And rid you of the joy of my company?"

A large, almost theatrical sigh came out of the darkness, and Joey grinned. Much as Seto would deny it, Joey had certainly had an influence on him. Seto _never_ used to be this playful. "This is was I get for adopting strays."

In rather the same vein, they reached the house.

Seto stopped to key in the password, feeling smug. He'd been thinking about this all week, wondering if it was really the best thing to do, the right thing to do, or if it was just the mutt's stupidity rubbing off on him, before coming to the satisfactory conclusion that it didn't particularly matter. He wanted it.

And that was good enough for him.

So when he felt Joey's hand land on his shoulder, he only paused, then looked slightly back at him, waiting.

To his surprise, Joey looked—nervous.

His eyes narrowed.

"What?"

Joey shuffled his feet slightly, then glanced up at him. "Just wondering something, that's all."

Seto turned, crossing his arms. "Wondering what?"

If I should be here. If you should be here with me. If this whole thing should have started in the first place. What we're going to do when we get inside. Why you brought me back. What you think of me. What I am to you.

He settled for the most basic. "If you were going to let me know where things stand with us."

One slim dark eyebrow arched, black in the pale lamplight. "There's an 'us'?"

Joey glared at him. "Don't get smart with me, Seto." He knew he shouldn't have come here. The bastard.

Seto just smiled slightly, and finished unlocking the door. "Why don't you come in and find out?"

The mansion was, of course, huge, but not in quite the same way Joey had often imagined it, with giant empty rooms tastefully, but sparsely, furnished. There were huge empty rooms, yes, but the majority of those seemed to be closed off or totally unused, whereas the kitchen was neat and bright and cheerful, and the living room next to it littered with video game cartridges, books, pillows from the couch, and empty soda cans. Joey looked around, amused.

"Looks almost like home. Messy."

Seto smiled ruefully. "Mokuba. Not as neat as I might wish."

Joey flopped onto the couch, spreading his arms along the back, running his fingers over the rich leather. "That's good, though. Kid his age, it'd be weird if he wasn't messy." He looked over at Seto, still standing, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "Don't you ever just want to dump your things into an unholy mess? Kinda spiritually cleansing, dontcha think?"

"I think you have no idea what you're talking about," Seto told him, but his lips curved into a hint of a smile, and Joey was heartened.

"So you don't like mess of any kind, huh?"

"I like you, don't I?"

Joey smiled warily. "Do you?"

It took only five steps for Seto to cross the rug to the sofa where Joey was sitting, and four more to bring him around the sofa until he was standing behind him, watching the warm yellow light from the table lamp reflect off of glittering golden hair. He reached down and gently patted it.

Joey's hair was so soft.

"I do."

A moment.

Joey looked up. "Come sit."

They sat for a long time, in silence, as Seto sifted through his briefcase, marking some papers, disposing of others, and making notes of his laptop, typing slowly with Joey dozing against his shoulder. But something—Joey frowned, thinking.

Something was missing.

"Hey, Seto."

A soft grunt.

"Do you have any ice cream?"

This was good, this was familiar, sweet vanilla melting over his tongue, even though the surroundings were different—cool where it had been warm, soft materials taking the place of velvety grass, and Seto—Seto near, Seto sitting next to him, Seto wanting him here, outside the park, into reality—although, Joey had to admit, this was pretty close to a few of his daydreams as well.

They were back in the living room, dark, since Seto had only turned the table lamp closest to his laptop, and he was licking vanilla ice cream off his spoon while Seto finished up work, typing quickly to finish, wondering what he was going to do once he did.

"Too much ice cream is bad for you," he said.

Joey shrugged. "Guess I'll have to settle for being unhealthy," he said, and licked his spoon with relish. "Besides, you've eaten almost as much as I have."

Blue eyes flicked towards him. "I have not."

Joey grinned, but said nothing, and Seto, apparently satisfied, turned back to his computer.

"So why'd you have ice cream in the fridge? If you don't eat it, that is."

The typing paused.

"It's for Mokuba."

Joey arched an eyebrow. "Funny, I would have thought that would have been the double-chocolate with caramel, not the plain vanilla."

The typing stopped.

The laptop shut.

Seto smiled.

Joey looked at him warily. Something was about to happen, he knew that much, and he knew it was probably something good, but he also knew Seto, and so he decided to err on the side of caution. "Finished work?"

Blue eyes slanted up at him, thin lips smiled. "You want to know why I have vanilla ice cream in my fridge?"

Joey blustered. "Well, it's not really a pressing concern, but, you know, I, um...yeah." He grinned sheepishly. "I do."

That thin grin grew, predatory and delighted, and Joey was definitely feeling more than a little nervous now. "Um, Seto...?"

"It was so when you came over, I could do this."

He took the bowl and spoon from Joey's hands and cut out a smooth curl of ice cream, held it up to Joey's mouth, and he opened his mouth silently and tasted smooth vanilla and cool metal, and Seto put down the bowl, and put down the spoon, and leaned over to taste vanilla on Joey's lips, in Joey's mouth, and Joey kissed him back with his hand sliding over cool skin and up into silky brown hair. Seto reached up to unbutton his shirt, smiling slightly as Joey loosened his tie, felt smooth cool material slip over his shoulders and along the skin of his back, brought his hand back to Joey's waist, grabbed the edge of his shirt.

But then.

Joey's lips moved. Seto pulled back, leaning his forehead against shining soft bangs, looking into serious dark brown eyes, and felt a chill. After all, summer was over now.

Fall was coming, and the long-fingered hand spread against his pale chest was trembling like a leaf about to fall.

"Wait."

Slim brown eyebrows frowned slightly. Perhaps they weren't meant to be real, after all.

"What?"

Joey looked up at him for a long moment, watching sea-clear eyes—

_He was hungry_

_Pale fingers paused, blue eyes flicked in his direction, and then the typing continued. "You know you're not allowed out without your license, Wheeler. Aren't you afraid you'll be sent to the pound?" He smirked, but then a drip of melted vanilla that had been flowing unnoticed over Joey's fingers fell onto his exposed wrist, and he looked at it, surprised._

"_Oh," Joey said, looking down. "Um, sorry."_

_"How astute of you," Kaiba said, amused. The scent of vanilla rose in the warm air._

"_Is it any good?" he asked, curious, remembering the small taste he'd had a few weeks ago. Joey shrugged._

_"I like it," he said, and then offered the cone up. "Want a taste?"_

_Kaiba hesitated, surprised by the artless familiarity of the action, but the scent of vanilla was rising sweetly through the air, so taking the cone, he licked off a small mouthful of cold, sweet, slightly melted ice cream and handed it back to Joey._

_"Thanks," he said, and licked a trace of vanilla off his lips._

_Joey watched him for a moment, and then turned back, flipping to the next page, and wondering briefly at the bizarre factors that had lead them to this; sitting in the warm late afternoon sun, only a few feet apart and not wanting to kill each other._

_And then he shrugged it off and became immersed in the book, sparing only a few extra seconds to register a craving for vanilla ice cream._

_There was enough of a certain well-known dreaminess in his voice that Joey had to look up, and he saw Kaiba's white throat pale in the warm summer light, saw a loose light shirt and the way it creased against Kaiba's lean chest and stomach, how the delicate fingers threaded through silky green grass. He saw fine dark lashes flutter slightly against pale cheeks, and one thin brown eyebrow twitched in response to a sudden and temporary shift of light and shadow over Kaiba's face._

_He tasted vanilla; warm vanilla as it slipped down the cone to land on Kaiba's white hand, tasted it slowly as he looked at Kaiba._

"_It's like vanilla," he said._

_Like vanilla. You didn't want it, but took it anyway, because you wanted ice cream. Like you didn't want to talk to Kaiba---_

_"Seto," he insisted, quietly._

_And now you crave it. All those times, sitting talking with him, you wanted vanilla. And every time you had vanilla, you wanted to see him, too. _

"_Thanks for bringing me my book," he said, quietly, and, hesitating, looked up to see Kaiba's response, but the blue eyes were closed and the lean chest rose steadily and smoothly in even breaths._

_Joey just looked at him, studying the paleness of his skin, the smooth material of his shirt, the way brown silky hair weaved into soft green grass. Leaning forward, he traced a strand of brown, feeling the smoothness against his callused fingertips._

_His eyes closed against the bright sunlight, Kaiba smelled vanilla, and almost smiled._

_Joey stared at the ruined cone, at his handful of vanilla, and shook his head, walking to a bush and dumping the mess into thick green leaves. He shook his hands out, watching droplets of ice cream fly off his fingertips, and wanted to laugh, or yell, or maybe just sink into the warm black pavement and avoid ice cream, fragile cones, and Kaiba for the rest of known existence._

_So he almost missed seeing Seto look at the vanilla on his hand, and, had he missed it, he would have missed too the sudden wary pause in the blue eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses or washed with sun these days. He recognized it. How could he not? He'd been watching that face for months._

_The smell of vanilla was everywhere._

"_Do I gotta spell it out for you?" he asked, stepping forward. "You're egotistic, and a know-it-all, and a rich arrogant bastard and smart and actually nice when you want to be and so fucking beautiful that I can't take my eyes off you, as I'm sure you've noticed. And now I guess we're just going to go back to hating each other, since the other option clearly isn't going to happen, and I'm sure as hell not gonna stick around now that you know all this, you rich bastard. So stop toying with me."_

_He took a breath, and steadied from the rush. He could feel his nails digging into his palms, his hands forced into fists, his whole body was trembling with anger and nerves and maybe just a little bit of anticipation._

_So he waited._

_And waited._

_And watched as Seto turned and walked off, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around the silver handle of his briefcase._

_The scent of vanilla swirled in his wake._

"_I guess I do know that," he said, "about it not being my fault, or my move, or whatever. But, you know, I still wonder."_

"_Why he's never looked at you and said to himself, 'Maybe that Wheeler kid's not so bad?'"_

_Joey pounded a fist into the pillow. "Yeah."_

_He shifted to glance at Seto._

"_If you wanted some ice cream," he told him, "you could have just asked."_

_Blue eyes looked up from blue screen, and moved from the melting cone of vanilla to Joey's roguish grin, and he reached out to take the cone. The scent of vanilla rose steadily through the warm air as he licked at it and took a large bit, so that when Joey leaned over and kissed him, he tasted vanilla—cool vanilla melting slowly in his mouth and in Joey's, sitting together in the park with the afternoon cooling into blue-green night._

—he didn't want to have to ask.

He had to ask.

"I want to know," he said, and was surprised by the way his voice came out in the silent room; rough, interrupting.

He tasted vanilla on his own breath.

Seto just looked at him, blue eyes unreadable in the lamplight, and Joey felt the rush of anger again, wondering if he was being toyed with after all, if none of it was real.

Maybe none of it was supposed to be real.

"Tell me."

What we are. If there's a "we."

If there's an "us."

Tell me there's an "us."

"You didn't answer my question from before."

A pause, while he caught his breath and tried to slow his racing heart. "You said you'd tell me inside."

He waited.

"No."

Brown eyes blinked, suddenly gold in a new shower of light as Seto pulled away, feeling cold spread over skin as warm bodies separated.

"No?"

Seto looked at him. "I can't...tell you."

Unspoken.

Like the park.

But was that really real?

"You can't tell me? If 'we' exist?" If there's more to us than a dream on a summer day?

"No. I said you'd find out."

The couch shifted, Seto shifted and moved and started to stand, only to be brought back down, hard, by a warm brown hand wrapped around his wrist, by warm brown eyes that smiled at him.

"Then let me find out."

Silence.

And then—thudding of heartbeats, quickening of breath, heated fingertips dragging over smooth skin, sweet, sweet vanilla.

And when Seto pulled Joey's shirt over his head, he leaned back against the armrest and watched while Seto traced a word onto his tanned stomach, white vanilla over golden skin, and watched as Seto licked it slowly off again, and smiled.

Because Seto had written this:

_YES._

Joey smiled, slowly.

And he turned the light out


End file.
